Who’s In It: Kristin Scott Thomas, Elsa Zylberstein
The Basics: Kristin Scott Thomas is a woman in France just sprung from prison after serving a 15-year sentence for killing her own six-year-old son. She moves back into her younger sister’s home where her brother-in-law understandably treats her like she might very well be dangerous to her own nieces, the nieces wonder why they’ve never met her before, the stroke-patient granddad just smiles at her silently, and her bereaved sibling desperately tries to re-establish a connection to the big sister she lost. In other words, it’s kind of a bummer.
What’s The Deal: This is an almost-good movie instead of a great movie because rather than making you deal with the cruel stark reality of KST being a child-killer, forcing you to care for her regardless of her guilt or innocence, refusing to let up on the ambiguity surrounding her, it cozies up to you and begs to be hugged. And that’s a drag because Kristin Scott Thomas is icy like the Cold-Miser and resolutely grim from start to finish, the kind of understated “Hey! Lookit, everybody! No makeup!” performance that gets you Oscar nominations. So she doesn’t fail; the movie fails her.
Why You Should Feel Insulted: Because up until the emotionally cathartic yelling match that closes the film and resolves all the unanswered questions, the movie maintains its distance and really does demand that you rise up to meet it. And then it forgives everyone—secrets and lies, y’all, they get uncovered!—and lets you go back to seeing the world in black and white like you don’t have a brain or the ability to deal with not-easily-wrapped-up narratives.
Why It’s Worth Seeing Anyway: There’s KST’s steely, unbending performance, but Elsa Zylberstein, as her emotionally wounded sister, is the real heartbreaker here. When she plays the movie’s title lullaby on the piano, you’d be kind of inhuman if you didn’t get choked up.
Yeah Yeah, We Know Already: KST’s accent while speaking French (the entire movie’s in French, FYI) is slightly British-sounding, so the script has to make sure you know that she’s not really French. Very territorial about their language, those folks.