There’s a bracing and chilly high-mindedness about Justine Triet’s psychothriller, about a suspicious death whose only reliable witness happens to be blind.
Sandra Hüller plays Sandra, a successful and fashionable author (that staple figure of French cinema), German by birth, but now living in a handsome chalet in the French Alps with her French husband Samuel, a former academic and would-be author himself, who has now hit a career slump and creative block and is currently hoping to salvage the family finances by fixing up the chalet as an Airbnb. It is while he is grumpily sawing and hammering upstairs, with the music on too loud, that Sandra attempts to give an interview, which simply has to be abandoned because of the noise. Sandra wearily attempts to take a nap, while their son Daniel takes their dog Snoop for a walk.
When he returns, his dad’s corpse is lying on the snow outside the chalet with a brutal wound on his head. Did he fall from the top window? Did his head hit something on the way down? Or did someone hit him? Poor Daniel is an unreliable witness because he is blind.

The film does not signpost the traditional twists and turns and dramatic reversals, but keeps a cool distance, letting us wonder if Sandra is guilty or not, and we are kept guessing until the end. It’s a lowkey, almost downbeat drama, but with something invigoratingly cerebral.