Category: 2009

James Cameron | 2hr 41min

There are few films that have had as contentious a spot at the top of the box office as Avatar, financially topping James Cameron’s previous record-breaking epic, Titanic, facing backlash from those claiming it’s nothing but empty spectacle, and then in more recent years finding renewed support in the backlash to the backlash. There’s no doubt that it is a technological marvel as well, though when this metric is used as the sole arbiter of success then naturally it is easy to see how quickly such films can grow outdated – one simply needs to look at the latter half of Robert Zemeckis’ career to see how this prioritising of scientific innovation over art does not instil a movie with great longevity. Cameron may be uniquely suited to the ideal synthesis of both, recognising how the creation of photorealistic visual effects is not an end unto itself, but simply serves an incredible visual aesthetic that even the most CGI-heavy blockbusters of the past decade have failed to live up to. He has pulled off this smooth integration before in the Terminator franchise and Titanic, and Avatar belongs right alongside those as monumental achievements of genre filmmaking and world-building.

It is no wonder that it took Cameron fifteen years to develop the fictional creation of Pandora, given how exceedingly detailed and complex it is. Rather than writing out lengthy historical chronicles as J.R.R. Tolkien did with The Lord of the Rings, he developed field guides around the alien ecosystem of the moon populated by the Na’vi. What we see in Avatar only covers a small percentage of that material, focusing predominantly on the Omatikaya clan and their surrounding jungle habitat, though the film’s immersive environment thrives on the small, otherworldly pieces hanging on the periphery which hint at a richer world than we can imagine. A blue, Jupiter-like planet dominates the sky, dotted with several other moons in orbit, and setting a gorgeous celestial backdrop that feels at least partially inspired by the dual suns of Tatooine in Star Wars. On the forest floor, the plant life is extremely sensitive to physical touch, withdrawing into pods and pulsating with light as characters run across its surface. Exposition is heavy in the opening, though once we are done with this Avatar’s visual filmmaking takes over, immersing us in its colonialist fable that regards the interconnectedness of all life with great, mystical reverence.

Cameron’s entire career is built on the mythological storytelling of historical legends and genre archetypes, so it is no outrageous statement that his talents as a writer are superseded by his bold direction. The flaws in the screenplay are evident, giving heavy-handed names like ‘unobtanium’ to significant plot devices and at times rejecting subtlety in favour of on-the-nose dialogue, but these are far from dealbreakers. This story is predominantly a visual one, representing the three main human characters outside of former Marine Jake Sully as icons of war, business, and science, and sending them to Pandora to invade the deeply spiritual Na’vi. It is telling that of those three figureheads, it is Sigourney Weaver’s exobiologist, Grace, who ends up siding with Jake in his defection to the native people, suggesting a harmony between science and faith which purely self-interested human endeavours cannot understand.

“There’s some kind of electrochemical communication between the roots of the trees. Like the synapses between neurons. Each tree has ten to the fourth connections to the trees around it, and there are ten to the twelfth trees on Pandora … That’s more connections than the human brain. You get it? It’s a network – a global network.”

What Grace expresses as technical jargon here is something Cameron has already formally laid out formally in his world-building though, establishing the foundation upon which the entire setting of Pandora exists. On Jake’s first night stranded in the moon’s jungle, he discovers an ethereal elegance that stems from its sentient plant life, floating tiny, jellyfish-like spores through the air and settling them on his body – an auspicious sign in Na’vi culture, given that they are considered pure, sacred spirits. Even more visually astounding is the bioluminescence which lights up Pandora’s forests with a blue, green, and purple glow, not just demonstrating Cameron’s incredible talent for creating aesthetic beauty from purely digital effects, but demonstrating a greater point as well in humanity’s blindness. The artificial lights of the invaders’ machines have always drowned out this natural splendour, and it isn’t until native Neytiri puts out Jake’s fire that he can see it too, opening his eyes to the symbiotic relationship between the land and its inhabitants.

In opposition to the Na’vi, we have the RDA – a human corporation looking to rip up their gigantic ‘Hometree’ for the precious resources that lie beneath. Instead of gorgeous alien scenery, they are defined by heavy machinery and sterile, blue interiors, harshly imposing on Jake in its own bleak way. To the Na’vi, humans are simply “sky people”, inferring a race that is disconnected from the land and which positions themselves as gods looking down on those below. Their attempts to contact the native people involve assuming their form to avoid frightening them, though the journey that Jake goes on in understanding their philosophy turns the ‘avatar’ into a metaphor of a different kind.

Between Jake’s two bodies, Cameron draws a distinction between his physical and spiritual self. One is limited in its movement, the other can run, ride, and fly animals. One is bound to a confined ship, the other can form a deep connection with an entire network of organisms. When he begins to neglect the material needs of one, he nurtures the other. Inside his mind, there is an awakening taking place that positions his avatar as his authentic self, leading to his eventual confession of the feeling that “Out there is the true world, and in here is the dream.” It is this duality that is the core tenet of so many tribal religions across the world, though in taking pieces of these and remixing them into alien culture, Cameron develops a philosophy that feels both rooted in familiar traditions and entirely unique to the ecological quirks of Pandora.

Chief among these idiosyncrasies is the neural queue shared by many organisms in the moon’s ecosystems, enabling intimate connections that vary from psychic to sexual. Beneath the Tree of Souls where Jake and Neytira join their queues as an expression of love, Cameron drapes them in its glowing vines, shedding a delicate blue and purple light upon this significant development in Jake’s journey to enlightenment. At another milestone where he learns to bond with a flying banshee via his queue, Cameron brings another display of immense visual style in an even grander set piece – the jaw-dropping Floating Mountains, hanging suspended in the atmosphere with waterfalls cascading into the sky below. Much like the wondrous helicopter shots that fly across New Zealand’s glaciers and fields in The Lord of the Rings, Cameron’s cinematography expresses its own visual wonder at the impossible scenery, instilling in us a transcendent awe at every step of Jake’s transformative pilgrimage.

With so much time spent immersed in Na’vi culture, the RDA’s destruction of Hometree feels all the more devastating, rendered as an apocalyptic disaster akin to the sinking of the Titanic. Not since we have been inside the human spaceship have we seen a palette so washed out as the aftermath, settling white ash across the burnt ground and leeching all colour from the once-vibrant jungle. Alongside the Na’vi retaliation though comes a resounding pay-off to their universalist philosophy, seeing Pandora itself come alive through the natural instincts of its native fauna uniting to defend its ecosystem – much like, as Grace might put it, a giant biological system activating its immune response.

Transposing familiar stories onto exciting new settings has always been Cameron’s strength, crafting classical redemption arcs, sweeping romances, and clashes of good and evil against spectacular canvases, and although Avatar may not be his most consistently flawless work, it is certainly at least his most purely ambitious. Such immense artistic aspiration is rare among directors with as large an interest in technological capabilities as him, but it is in his use of digital effects to create bold entertainment alongside rich, allegorical artistry that he fully realises its immense artistic potential more than any other working filmmaker.

Avatar is currently streaming on Disney Plus, and is available to buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Amazon Video.

Xavier Dolan | 1hr 36min

The number of directors under 30 years old with film debuts that belong among the finest of their decade is limited. Paul Thomas Anderson was 27 when he made Boogie Nights. Orson Welles was 25 when he both directed and starred in Citizen Kane. Then there is Xavier Dolan, standing alone in his own category – at 19 years old, the Canadian teenager burst onto the indie cinema scene with I Killed My Mother, making waves with his remarkably mature, semi-autobiographical depiction of a troubled mother-son relationship. Like Welles before him, he takes on the lead role in his directorial debut, and yet this doesn’t distract him from doing some impressive work behind the camera. Dolan’s neatly composed visuals weave in bright colour palettes and expressive backdrops with a vivid sensitivity all through his film, delicately radiating his characters’ complex emotions out into the wider world.

At its centre we find 16-year-old Hubert, whose resentment of his mother, Chantale, burns him up with intense rage. When we first meet him, it is his most singularly defining quality, and may even come off as flat, one-note character writing, given how little else we know about him. For Dolan, this is entirely on purpose. When the two are together, Hubert feels entirely stifled, not just by his mother’s irritating habits, but also by his own blind contempt. Our introduction to her in a slow-motion close-up of her mouth biting into a cream cheese bagel is enough to irk anyone’s senses, but even more substantially, we can see for ourselves the ways in which she occasionally mishandles her son’s behaviour. She is not a bad mother, but through Hubert’s eyes as a teenager abandoned by his father, it certainly seems that way.

“When I try to imagine what the worst mother in the world looks like, I can’t do better than you.”

There is also often a symmetry drawn through Dolan’s mise-en-scène that places either Hubert or Chantale at its centre, or which at least balances out the other side of the shot with their scene partners. At the same time, this visual harmony is usually offset by a huge amount of negative space pressing down on them from above, forcing them towards the bottom of the frame. Pawel Pawlikowski would later incorporate this device into his own stylistic repertoire with Ida and Cold War, and here the effect serves a similarly oppressive purpose, threatening to push them out of sight altogether. Incidentally, it also gives Dolan the chance to craft visual expressions of their feelings above their heads, swirling a pattern of green, yellow, and red curves on a diner wall behind Hubert as he builds a connection with his teacher, Ms Cloutier, and later shooting a night sky of bleary city lights behind him on a bus as he mulls over his misery.

On the occasion that Dolan’s camera does shift away from his characters entirely, he often presents these diversions as montages cutting between specific items in their environment – ornamental butterflies in Chantale’s home, religious icons around Hubert’s school, or in one particularly joyous scene, the splatters of paint he throws up on an office wall with his boyfriend, Antonin. Not only do these cutaways become extensions of Dolan’s characters, but they imbue I Killed My Mother with a beautiful formal rigour, creating a structural rhythm that is further developed in Hubert’s recurring monologues delivered to his home video camera. Though these stand out as being the only scenes in black-and-white, the muted visual tone nicely fits in with his own sensitive musings, offering a counterpoint to his otherwise volatile characterisation. Only when he is alone can he speak of his mother with genuine sorrow rather than bitterness, and fully realise the intricacies of their relationship.

“It’s a paradox having a mother that you’re incapable of loving but incapable not to love.”

With a performance as nuanced and impassioned as that which Anne Dorval delivers here, it’s not hard to understand this contradictory sentiment either. Like Hubert, Chantale holds onto a great deal of anger and stubbornness, and yet as his mother, she is far more likely to channel that frustration into protecting their relationship. At the slightest hint from her son’s headmaster that he might benefit from having a male authority at home, she flies into a rage, rejecting the insinuation that it is her parenting which has driven him away, and instead redirecting the blame towards the patriarchal systems and negligent men who have failed them.

It is a shame that Hubert never sees this side of her while she is afforded a glimpse of his sensitive home videos, but as Dolan posits, this is simply the nature of these family bonds. Parents are rarely flawless, but they possess a larger understanding of their child than their child has of them, and it is that imbalance which inflicts great pain on both characters in I Killed My Mother. Though this title explicitly refers to Hubert’s lie early in the film that his mother is dead, it is clear in Dolan’s exceptionally complex character dynamics that it is also something she torturously experiences every single day, ceaselessly driving them both deeper into the inescapable, unsolvable problem of their own contemptuous love.

I Killed My Mother is not currently available to stream in Australia.

Michael Mann | 2hr 20min

Notorious bank robber John Dillinger is a slippery man, but he at least can’t be faulted for his honesty. The same day he meets his soon-to-be lover Billie Frechette, he also confesses to her the truth of his shady career. He moves fast with no inhibition, knocking down her uncertainty with a suave openness that comes naturally to Johnny Depp, so it doesn’t come as too much of a surprise that when he is finally arrested and driven through crowds of Americans in Depression-era Arizona, he finds them cheering for him rather than hurling abuse. In such trying times where masses are suffering beneath the crushing capitalist system, his legacy effectively becomes a success story – not of a rule-follower rising to the top, but rather a criminal who dubiously levels the playing field by targeting the wealthy elite.

Michael Mann is well-acquainted with such urban crimes dramas as these, where criminals and law enforcers circle each other inside sprawling cities and ultimately discover something of themselves in their foe. It is a well-worn convention that he perfected in Heat and resurrects here in Public Enemies with Depp and Christian Bale, chronicling the final years of the real John Dillinger as he is tracked down by FBI agent Melvin Purvis across 1930s America.

The result is a crime period piece that luxuriates in the extravagance and dilapidation of the Great Depression, studying this vast inequality to understand the frustration which motivates Dillinger and his crew of robbers. All of them are so used to the inside of jail cells that escaping almost comes as second nature to them, pulling it off twice in this film much to the frustration of the FBI. The first comes right at the start with Dillinger executing a carefully plotted prison break at Indiana State Penitentiary. The second comes much later and happens entirely spontaneously, proving him to be particularly resourceful in his use of a fake gun.

The foundation of Mann’s success in Public Enemies is made up of thrilling set pieces like these, as well as his production design which opens ripe opportunities for marvellously imposing compositions. With a deep focus lens and a penchant for low angles, Mann turns majestic bank ceilings and opulent light fixtures into gorgeous backdrops for Dillinger’s crimes, setting him up as a dauntingly confident figure unafraid to take what he wants. Elsewhere, forest hideouts and concrete prisons become settings for action sequences beyond Dillinger’s comfort zone, forcing him to reckon with the grittier side of his job. Mann achieves a beautiful crispness in these set pieces, and yet in darker lit scenes he also occasionally lets through an ugly digital grain that is difficult to excuse.

Even beyond his long shots and excellent staging though, Mann brings an intimacy to his widescreen frame with close-ups of Dillinger and Purvel, their mental fortitude gradually wearing thin. Though their direct interactions are scarce, they are also incredibly revealing, as the two share a common understanding of the heavy conscience that comes with taking a life. With this established, the tension that leads into their final confrontation is immense, as Mann cuts between the FBI’s advance upon the movie theatre that Dillinger is inside, and the Clark Gable film he is watching. Just before he leaves, it delivers some wise words of advice.

“Die the way you lived, all of a sudden, that’s the way to do it. Don’t drag it out, living like that doesn’t mean a thing.”

There might be a roughly equal balance of screen time between Purvel and Dillinger in Public Enemies, but it is clear which one Mann is more fascinated by. As this notorious bank robber is gradually drained of his resources and his allies, he begins to shatter and take even greater risks, at one point walking through a police station in disguise and asking them the baseball game score out of sheer audacity. Public Enemies may not be the intensive study of opposing equals that Heat so effortlessly pulls off, but in Mann’s superb staging and Depp’s magnetic performance, it nevertheless becomes a compelling examination of an unjust system slowly squeezing out its most vocal dissidents.

Public Enemies is currently available to stream on Binge and Foxtel Now, and available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, Google Play, and Amazon Prime Video.

Denis Villeneuve | 1hr 17min

The tragic college shooting that takes place in Polytechnique is bookended by two voiceovers, both reading out letters. The first belongs to the unnamed murderer, writing his suicide note that lays out his bitterly sexist motivations. Though he does not speak much throughout the film, it is this pungent misogyny which hangs over the film like a monstrous shadow, stalking victims down hallways and mercilessly taking their lives. The other voiceover which closes the film belongs to a survivor, Valérie. In the letter she writes to his parents she expounds the devastation their son has left behind, but she also speaks of the guidance she will provide to the child now growing inside her belly that they never gave to theirs.

Between the two voiceovers, Denis Villeneuve creates a terrifyingly bleak reconstruction of the 1989 Polytechnique Montreal massacre as seen through the eyes of two students. One of them is Valérie, who is badly wounded in a brutal attack. The other is Jean-François, who may be the closest thing we get to a hero in this hopeless situation. The model of masculinity that he projects exists in stark contrast to the killer’s toxic ideologies, and yet not even his selfless efforts to rescue his peers is enough to conquer the overwhelming despair that the shooter brings inside these halls.

Villeneuve plays out this massacre twice over from the alternate points-of-view of Jean-François and Valérie. It goes without saying which version carries even greater mortal terror to it, given the killer’s motives. The first time we see him enter a classroom and send the men outside, we carry their guilt for not staying behind and doing more. The second time we watch this play out from the inside with the women, the fear is immediate and inescapable. Such is the impression that Villeneuve captures in this structure that even in repeating it twice over, we never quite feel that it really comes to an end. Just as it plays out in the minds of traumatised survivors for years to come, so to do we feel doomed to live out the same soul-shaking torment on repeat.

Outside this engineering school, snowy landscapes set a dismal, unforgiving tone that matches the killer’s cold isolation and bitterness. For these students, Polytechnique doubles as both a place of growth and a comfortable shelter from the icy Canadian winter, and as the lone shooter enters its premises, he destroys both. Those who manage to make it out scatter into the blizzard, looking like small black dots facing an equally dreary world than the one they just came from. For one survivor haunted by the trauma, this snow-white exterior similarly becomes the setting of his own eventual suicide, wrapping the young man up in the same pernicious grip which took away fourteen other students and teachers, and prolonging the massacre long after the killer’s death.

Those who remain inside though, whether by choice or because they are trapped, find themselves locked inside a labyrinth. Long tracking shots hang onto the back of our main cast’s heads much like Gus van Sant did in Elephant, his dramatisation of the Columbine High School massacre, though within the modernist architecture of Polytechnique Montreal where narrow corridors and angles trap our main cast in claustrophobic frames, Villeneuve effectively turns the environment into a complex series of passageways to navigate. In one shot he flips his camera sideways to track across a row of bookshelves seemingly rising upwards, and later it turns completely upside down to turn a hallway ceiling into a floor which he unnervingly dollies down.

Perhaps the most disturbingly quiet image in Polytechnique though is the overhead shot of the killer lying dead on the floor, next to the body of his final victim. As Villeneuve’s camera pulls back and twists around, their two pools of blood intermingle into one. Had this been shot in colour, perhaps we would have recoiled at the overbearing gore of such a grotesque sight. Instead, his monochrome photography simply considers the light and shape of such powerful compositions, letting the symbolism of this shot arrive at a more psychologically unsettling conclusion – the deaths of all these people will forever be tied to one violent, hateful man.

With Valérie’s final voiceover looking to the future though, Villeneuve delivers one last piece of hope. For those who lived and died through the massacre of Polytechnique, there may not be any more peaceful nights of sleep, trusting that the world is a good place. But in their children, there is always another chance for women to understand their value, and for men to do better.

Polytechnique is not currently available to stream in Australia.

Michael Haneke | 2hr 24min

Michael Haneke continues his use of unsettling, open-ended mysteries to provoke both his characters and viewers into unresolved frustration in The White Ribbon, sending them on a search for answers that never materialise. It is a large ensemble that sprawls out across its bleak, restrained narrative, consisting of largely archetypal figures – most notably the Baron, the Priest, and the Doctor. These men represent wealth, religion, and intelligentsia, and together they enforce strict rules over the women, farmers, and children of the town.

We are first introduced to the narrative by the voiceover of an elderly schoolteacher describing a parable he isn’t sure reflects the truth in every detail, but which he believes may “cast a new light on the goings-on in this country.” The setting is a rural German village on the precipice of World War I. There is no need for any further contextual elaboration from the narrator.

At first the collection of unfortunate, unusual incidents that take place in the town seem like sheer bad luck. Maybe the wire that tripped the Doctor’s horse and sent him to hospital was supposed to be a harmless prank. Maybe the farmer’s wife who fell through rotten floorboards was just being careless. Some events can be more easily explained, like the grieving husband who hangs himself. But still, there is a strange aura of uncertainty around this village that only seems to grow. Suspicion is cast on the children, who exhibit strange behaviour. They leer at grown-ups accusingly, who then in turn deliver cruel, moralistic punishments. One girl seems to possess supernatural premonitions of these events – or perhaps she is really aware of some plot the adults don’t know about.

The Priest resolves that tying white ribbons around the arms of the children will remind them of their purity, a fruitless bid for them to remain innocent. Yet these meaningless symbols are at odds with the adults’ treatment of the children. A boy who steals another’s flute is violently beaten by his father. One boy who confesses to masturbating has his arms tied to his bed. Directly after this scene, we catch the Doctor in the act of adultery with the midwife. In truth, it is these men who are the hypocritical, self-righteous sinners of the town. The children’s innocence is under threat from no one but the men who claim they are trying to preserve it.

As the breakout of World War I marks the final act of the film, we are once again reminded of the larger global catastrophe that is mirroring the smaller ones taking place in this town. This war to end all wars was an act of violence by men in positions of power trying to protect their families and countrymen, but it only ended up hurting the innocent. This widespread destruction of innocence traumatised a generation of German youths who would grow up to cause an even greater conflict. Haneke doesn’t offer specific answers about who has been tearing the town apart from within, but he does suggest that these occurrences are a result of the adults’ corruption. A passage from the bible left at the scene of a vicious beating of a child paints this out clearly.

“For I, the Lord, your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sins of their parents’ sins to the third and fourth generation.”

Still, most of the men and women of this town go on in their harsh ways, refusing to accept the possibility that the children are learning cruelty, not discipline.

“Despite the strange events that had haunted the village, we thought of ourselves as united in the belief that life in our community was God’s will, and worth living.”

The few that do recognise the changing behaviours of the children usually go ignored. When the Baroness tells her husband she is taking his children away from these surroundings dominated by “malice, envy, apathy and brutality” and leaving him for another man, his only concern is whether she has slept with this new suitor yet. Later, the midwife learns the truth behind the atrocities, but she quickly disappears. The truth is powerless against whatever is working behind the scenes here. Perhaps we are better off not knowing.

As most of Haneke’s films are, The White Ribbon is formally rigorous in its multitude of motifs. The titular ribbons, the closed doors hiding acts too terrible to see, the parakeets as mirrors of the children’s trauma – Haneke uses symbols to hint at something truly insidious, but just as the film never plunges into the barbarism of World War I, he often leads us up to the doorstep of evil only to cut away at the last second. He keeps us at a distance from his characters. Whenever we do see something horrific, like a mutilated bird or a dead woman, we never get a reaction shot following it. Emotion never immediately spills to the surface, but the cumulative effect of this repression does inevitably burst out in angry, violent demonstrations.

Haneke is not known for his striking images, but the stark, monochrome beauty of The White Ribbon leaps out in practically every shot. Though he isn’t averse to close-ups, Haneke’s wide shots are worth marvelling at for their strong compositions of sharp black and white hues battling it out for dominance of the image. In one scene the darkness of the night smothers the frame, only to be pierced with the blinding light of a fire billowing out from the barn. In another, the narration recalls how the snowy landscape “hurt the eyes”, though dark silhouettes of farmers can still be seen trudging through it. There is detail in the mise-en-scène right down to the costumes, as the opposing shades will clutter tableaus of crowds in the village square, balancing each other out.

Though The White Ribbon is mostly without music, the single exception comes in the final scene set in the church, where the children’s choir sings a hymn. It is an appropriate end to a parable that hints at, without ever explaining, how evil is born through puritanical chastisement, hypocrisy, and apathy. Haneke’s masterpiece is full of tension between the pull of innocence and corruption, but its lack of clear resolution is precisely what continues to make it so compelling.

The White Ribbon is currently available to stream on Beamafilm and Shudder.

Jacques Audiard | 2hr 35min

In the lineage of epic gangster films stretching from the original 1932 Scarface, through the genre’s resurgence in the 70s, and all the way to the present day, Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet slots in neatly as a drama just as rich in character development and narrative power as any of its predecessors. The traditional rags-to-riches story arc finds new life in Algerian teen Malik El Djebena, whose six-year prison sentence lands him in the midst of a gang war between Muslim and Corsican inmates. Malik, being neither, is taken under the wing of the Corsican mob after carrying out an assassination on a Muslim prisoner, Reyeb, then later earns the trust of the Muslims as well after learning more about his own heritage.

Audiard’s stylistic approach to the raw grittiness of the piece emerges in his handheld camera and cool, blue wash all through the penitentiary, within which his detailed accounts of the gangs’ complex power structures unfold and root this narrative in a modern-day, multicultural France. The contained scope is captured in high-angle wide shots of the prison courtyard where the rival factions congregate on either side, the disdain hanging thick in the open, empty space between them. Though all the inmates speak French, the language divide of Arabic and Corsican serves to isolate them from each other, and it is Malik’s resolve to defeat his illiteracy and master all three languages that provides him the key to great power, becoming “the eyes and ears” of the prison. In playing both fields he gradually finds himself rising up the ranks of the mob hierarchy, this upwards trajectory bookmarked by chapter titles imprinted over freeze frames and slow-motion shots that temporarily remove us from the immediate action.

These formal breaks are further justified by the bursts of magical realism which make their way into Malik’s otherwise grounded journey, endowing him with a divine clairvoyancy. On a practical level, it is a reflection of his ability to reach further than his usual grasp through his learned multilingualism and sharp wit, and yet within his own mind it manifests as ghostly visions of Reyeb, acting as his spiritual guide. In this ethereal form, holy fire follows Reyeb whenever he appears, sometimes wreathing and burning his body, and at other times burning atop his finger as a flame. Through all of Malik’s loneliest moments, Reyeb is there offering wisdom and companionship, but also silently reminding him of the sinful act that set him on this path.

If we were to doubt the reality of such hallucinatory visions, then Audiard brings Malik’s two worlds together at just the right moment during a tricky business dealing, when his prophecy of a car colliding with a wild deer comes to manifest. At this point, as the deer is flung high up into the air, Audiard returns to the slow-motion photography we have witnessed in his chapter breaks, emphasising this manifestation of Malik’s spiritual gift. Just as he wins the astonished respect of those present to witness his prophecy, he similarly goes on to earn the esteem of high-level mafia operators with his insight and diplomacy, leaping over those who he once served. The model of reformation that Malik embodies might superficially point to the success of the justice system, as he does indeed come out from behind bars with an education, refreshed spirituality, and a new lease on life. And yet there is a distinct irony to the fact that in achieving these goals, prison has also incidentally turned a petty criminal into a drug kingpin. As Malik finally reaches the end of his six-year sentence and suavely leaves with a leather jacket and neat haircut, Audiard’s powerful final shot reveals an entourage of black cars silently trailing behind them. Now with a mass of allies and associates, endless opportunities await the Algerian prophet and crime lord as he continues to expand his empire into the society that once despised him.

A Prophet is currently available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.