Moral contusions again colour the Dardennes’ film, and again it falls to their protagonist to pick through the conundrums of her neighbours. Dr Davin, having already verbalised her discomfort at her connection to the young woman’s death (she didn’t answer an after-hours call on her office bell, not knowing the girl was in distress), treats her rudimentary detective work as a remedy for her emotional ailment.
While well-diagnosed, the treatment is not up to the Dardennes’ best work. Haenel is mostly inscrutable in performance, holding her emotions at arm’s length while she tries to effect her cure. Those she comes into contact with are similarly standoffish in their desire to hide their involvement, so it is difficult to deeply engage with the film beyond the discrete steps on the trail to tentative absolution.
When that absolution comes, it tumbles out in a parade of encounters which closely approximate the end of a Scooby Doo mystery, with various players dropping by to fess up or share their own discomfort with everything that has gone down. It is a climax that underlines the extent to which the Dardennes’ have cannibalised their own worth. No longer are they getting down in the trenches and describing the world of the Belgian underclass; they are having the Belgian underclass come to describe their world to someone in an entirely privileged position.
Those issues aside, the Dardennes know their craft, so everything from a production perspective is impeccable, performances included. Just doesn’t hold up well to what they’ve given us before.
★★★
The Unknown Girl screened as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival 2016.
You can check out other films from the festival here.
You can check out other films from the festival here.
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