Sombre (1998)
Directed by Philippe Grandrieux

Film Review

Philippe Grandrieux's first full length cinema film has unleashed a storm of controversy since its showing at the Locarno initernational film festival in 1998. It had critics solidly divided into two camps - those who regard it as an obscene, unwatchable mess, and others who rate it as a sublime masterpiece of the psychosexual thriller genre.   It is clearly a film which is acceptable only to certain tastes, and many will find the film very hard to stomach.

Certainly, Grandrieux's extremely minimalist photography, much of which involves jerky camera movements and hazy out-of-focus images shot in virtual pitch-blackness, makes few concessions to traditional cinema audiences.  To his credit, some of this unusual - and frankly disorientating - cinematography serves the film well, heightening the menace in the killer and the brutality of his murders by showing little and prompting us to imagine much more than we see.  The idea presumably is to show the world as the obsessed killer sees it, through a darkened filter with periodic loss of focus.

Unfortunately, however inspired Grandrieux's cinematography is, it very quickly becomes tiresome and repetitive, and all we are left with is a wafer thin scenario which appears to lack both imagination and artistic merit.  The plot is little more than child's fairy tale, a bastardised version of Beauty and the Beast, which is perverted into a limp story about a psychotic killer and an idealised virgin.  True, the film attains some moments of genius along the way, and the performances of the lead actors are creditable, but the whole work is hampered by its singular lack of development.

Initially stunning and genuinely frightening, the film soon becomes stale and uneventful.   However, the title is aptly chosen and is the best word to describe a film which is relentlessly gloomy from start to finish. It makes a perfect companion-piece to Grandrieux's subsequent and equally idiosyncratic Un lac (2009).

Film Synopsis

Following the route of the Tour de France, a solitary motorist Jean periodically stops off to pick up and brutally kill a prostitute.  During a rain storm, he runs into a young woman, Claire, whose car has broken down.   He offers her a lift...