Vinyan

As the loss of their child overwhelms them with grief, a successful couple (Béart and Sewell, both on good form) retreat to a mysterious place where they hope for reconciliation, but instead find… Well, that would be giving it away. But if this synopsis sounds familiar, that’s probably because it is. After gleefully subverting every convention of the backwoods horror with Calvaire, Belgian director Fabrice Du Welz’s second feature is a much more straightforward affair, doing little to confound our expectations of how a story like this will pan out. Aesthetically owing much to the transgressive ordeal pictures of Gaspar Noé, Michael Haneke and Bruno Dumont, Vinyan skilfully establishes an uncomfortable atmosphere, as our protagonists head into a Conradian post-tsunami Burma. But the flat characterisation and cold direction mean that by the time the ho-hum climax arrives, we’ve lost interest. The film has some interesting ideas, but nothing to match the melancholy of Don’t Look Now or the naked urgency of Antichrist.