Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winner is part legal thriller, part marital autopsy. Sandra Hüller plays Sandra Voyter, a successful novelist whose husband Samuel is found dead in the snow outside their isolated French chalet. Their visually-impaired son Daniel becomes the central witness.
The brilliance is that Triet refuses to give you an answer. The film is a 150-minute conversation about whether we can ever know what happens inside a marriage — and whether the truth of that matters when a child needs to make a decision about who to believe.
Hüller is monumental. The courtroom flashback to a recorded argument between her and her husband is one of the most uncomfortable, true scenes about marriage ever put to film. It’s so honest it feels invasive.
This is what serious adult cinema looks like.
