Real life couple Mélanie Thierry and Raphaël Haroche teamed up to create this mesmerizingly taut film with Thierry being at the helm and Haroche serving as the accompanist. The story revolves around Nicolas (Charles Van de Vyver) a family man who works at a slaughterhouse where he suddenly finds himself transfixed upon a calf delivered one uneventful day.
With a relatively simple premise, the filmmaker manages to find a way to indulge the audience to gape at the atmosphere of the places which the characters of the story populate. And while the ending leaves one in a pensive state, the blissfulness of the closing music helps the viewer be weaned off from any residue of this truly disheartening short cinematic journey.
Though the Nicolas character is the focus of the film, the three other actors: Zoé Fauconnet as Estelle, his wife, Liviu Bora as Yuri, his co-worker, and Louise Blachère as Sandrine as the slaughterhouse supervisor, all of them are engaging performances, significant in development of a narrative that just lets the viewer organically form their own judgment, a style which never really gets old.
My rating: A-minus.
