Incendies

 Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette), two twenty-something twins, get an unusual bequest from their late mother Marwan (Lubna Azabal): Two envelopes, one to be delivered to their father (whom the twins thought was dead), and one to be delivered to a third brother (whom the twins knew nothing about).

 Until these are delivered, the mother is to be buried naked, face down, and with no tombstone - as befits an oathbreaker.

 It's an immediately enthralling premise. Simon wants nothing to do with this madness, but Jeanne soon travels back to her mother's fictional Middle East homeland (the film was shot in Jordan, but the story echoes some Lebanese events) to slowly uncover her mom's history. Which includes a forbidden love, all sorts of turmoil, a radicalization, imprisonment - the twins soon become background characters as Marwan's story is told in fragments, her arc slowly becoming apparent. It's an extremely novelistic approach, but it works beautifully as the individual parts are compelling and the mystery is an interesting one.

 Until the very end, which contains a couple of very contrived, extremely improbable coincidences which... well, which kind of break the movie. Not just because they strain any possible suspension of disbelief - they're integral to the movie's development, so you could take it as a sort of magic-realist development - but because of the light they cast on Marwan's bequest. I mean, it was always going to be a overtly writerly plot device, but it ends up looking like a cheesy psycho masterplan - the sort of thing you'd see in SeSevenven or the Saw movies.

 And it's a shame, because so much of the movie is so good. Denis Villeneuve was already an established director when this was made, and his style is in top form, keeping events flowing cleanly and the sense of menace ever present - the film runs over two hours, but the expert pacing and well-developed script (by Villeneuve and  Valérie Beaugrand-Champagne, based on a play by Wajdi Mouawad) more than justifies it. It's also punctuated with a deeply upsetting action scene (of the war-is-hell variety) that's as good as anything he's ever shot and casts a long shadow over the events of the back half.

 All the actors acquit themselves admirably, with Azabal especially good as Marwan - she carries a lot of heavy scenes pretty much on her own. Cinematographer André Turpin gets in a lot of striking shots, including a beatiful and disturbing opening shot featuring soon-to-be child soldiers set to a song from Radiohead's bleakest period.

 Overall I liked the movie, as I feel its strengths compensate for its eventual weaknesses, but those late-film revelations make it really hard to recommend. That's always a risk with this sort of puzzlebox approach to scripting. I get that it's aiming for a literary feel, more of a russian novel than a standard film, but it ends up coming across like a telenovela.