Villeneuve’s career began in the Quebecois film industry with a series of self-penned, idiosyncratic movies where he built his chops. In Hollywood, the sophistication of the scripts he’s picked have often failed to match the grandeur and force of his direction. But he brings a sweep to his films that’s hard to pin down and replicate, an admirable ambition to every story he tells.

Rankings

• Denis Villeneuve’s Films Ranked

Chronological

• August 32nd on Earth (1998) (Good)
• Maelstrom (2000) (Good)
• Polytechnique (2009) (Not Very Good)
• Incendies (2010) (Very Good)
• Prisoners (2013) (Good)
• Enemy (2013) (Nearly Good)
• Sicario (2015) (Good)
• Arrival (2016) (Very Good)
• Blade Runner 2049 (2017) (Exceptionally Good)
• Dune (2021) (Good)
• Dune: Part Two (2024) (Very Good)

By Rating

Exceptionally Good (7/8)

• Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Very Good (6/8)

• Incendies (2010)
• Arrival (2016)
• Dune: Part Two (2024)

Good (5/8)

• August 32nd on Earth (1998)
• Maelstrom (2000)
• Prisoners (2013)
• Sicario (2015)
• Dune (2021)

Nearly Good (4/8)

• Enemy (2013)

Not Very Good (3/8)

• Polytechnique (2009)

Last Updated

• 9/27/24

Review Index

For starters, I am very grateful that the first half of Dune 2 shrinks the scope of the story world down to Paul’s (Timothee Chalamet) sojourn with the Fremen. Looking back on the whole five-hour two-parter, this is the heart of Dune, a clash between the natural and the mechanical, the indigenous and the colonial. Perhaps I’m just Star Wars-brained, but watching rebels from a desert planet destroying expensive imperial equipment just feels right.

I also think the terrific opening hour of Part Two does a great job of humanizing Paul in a way that Part One never really does. The audience really gets a sense of the weight on his shoulder as the would-be messiah. I, too, would consider throwing it all away if I fell asleep under the stars every night snuggling Zendaya as she hums “You Belong With Me” in my ears. His relationship with the Fremen is a bit Dances with Wolves, but it offers a compelling deconstruction (and tragic reconstruction) of “chosen one” stories.

The next act of the film is nearly as good, though in different ways. We hop to the Harkonnen planet to meet a new prince, one who might soon be declared Chief Bald Albino Nutjob and Lord of Arrakis if he wins a gladiator battle. (Or something like that.) There’s a lot to enjoy in this stretch of the film. The first is the color grading, which seems to be triggered in-universe by lighting from a black sun. It’s an artificially imposed black and white. Something about it just looks off, which in turn makes it deeply uncanny and also deeply compelling.

This segment is also when we get to see Austin Butler in action as (checks Wikipedia) Feyd-Rautha. You will not be ready for how bald Butler is in this film. You think you will be ready for how bald he is, but then his baldness will overwhelm you. More to the point, Butler is sensationally good in this. He was great in Elvis, of course, totally transformed, but seeing it happen again is confirmation that it wasn’t a fluke. I will be excited for any future movie he is cast in, particularly if the movie requires him to go there. Dude can act act.

Another thread that consistently works is anything involving Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson). As great as Butler is, Ferguson is even better and more central as an increasingly unhinged zealot pushing Paul on a messianic path. She provides a slightly antagonistic force to Paul’s arc, giving him a plausible reason that he might upend his relationship with Chani in the name of galactic order. At one point she is forced to drink a Forbidden Baja Blast potion that transforms her into a full-on prophet. It also allows her to communicate with her own fetus. Presented the opportunity, I would unquestionably drink the Forbidden Baja Blast.

And then the various threads all comes together in a sort of contrived final set piece. The status quo gets shaken up with secret nukes. Why not? For some reason, every character of note ends up on Arrakis to discuss the future of the planet, and therefore the industry of spice, and therefore the empire as a whole. Will Paul stick up for Chani and the Fremen? Will he make a bigger power play of some sort? Will the emperor’s daughter (Florence Pugh) be involved? Will it all end with a declaration that “the real battle has only just begun”? Considering Denis Villeneuve apparently views this as the middle act of a trilogy, the latter is pretty much a given.

Speaking of Dune Messiah, the now-greenlit third part of Dune, I pulled up the corresponding book’s Wikipedia page shortly after watching Dune: Part Two, my curiosity getting the better of my spoiler aversion. But as soon as my eyes caught the word “clone,” I quickly closed the page. The lore of this universe still seems goofy as hell to me, but with five hours under my belt, I’m along for the ride now. I’ll let the mystery be until the next film is ready. Fuck me up, Denis.

(Speaking of goofy-as-hell lore, the minor detail I became fixated on for this movie is the sand walking. It’s a stumbly, awkward motion that’s halfway between The Ministry of Silly Walks and Audrey’s dance in the Twin Peaks diner. I laughed every single time.)

Dune: Part Two confirms the suspicion I had watching Part One that the latter was more of a prelude slideshow to get us to the promise of the premise. (In fact, if I were to look at this overall two-part story purely from a cinematic lens rather than an adaptational one, I’d say Villeneuve could have transformed the entirety of Part One into a 20-30 minute opening act for this film.) I can’t say Part Two made me like Part One more as a standalone movie, but it at least helped me better appreciate the worldbuilding it does, and made me slightly more likely to revisit it at some point.

And anchoring all of this, of course, is the brilliant production by Villeneueve. It always feels huge but also occasionally intricate in a way Part One never did. I could, for stretches, believe people lived on this desert planet. I almost even cared about a few of the people a couple of times.

Whether Paul is riding a giant worm like a water skier, grappling with Feyd-Rauth in a duel to the death, or claiming his divinity on a cliff side to thousands of followers, Dune: Part Two always looks so cinematic. When I imagine “going to the movies” in the abstract, it pretty closely matches the awe I felt watching Dune: Part Two.

I maintain my suggestion that Villeneuve should keep making big, meticulous adaptations. It sands away the lopsided edges of his writing, or rather it bowls them over with obsessive rendering of preexisting story and world. Not many directors working today can do this kind of work; and not many stories better leverage Villeneuve’s strengths than the colossal monolith of Dune.

Maybe, after all, it does come down to the size of the IMAX screen and the decibels of the Dolby Atmos speakers in the theater in which I viewed Dune: Part Two. The experience swept me away, and, this time, I was happy to go along.

Thus I think it is fair for me to open this review with my relationship with Dune the book: I have none. I know very little about it except some cultural osmosis. I’ve never read it — in fact, I haven’t read much grown-up sci-fi, period. But Dune has never been near the top of my list for the genre: Whenever it comes up in conversation, people who have read it, even people who love it, drown it in equivocation: “You have to be prepared for some weird shit.” — “It’s got a great story, but parts of it will make you raise your eyebrows.” — “It’s maybe too dense with lore and worldbuilding, but worth the effort.” Okay, sure. I’m not really buying it. Also, who sets their galactic, multi-century sci-fi epic in a desert? I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.

Like Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, Dune sometimes feels like a PowerPoint presentation of characters, places, and events. Tons of names and lore details tossed out either because fans mandate it or because it’s required for future plot events to make sense. I imagine it is deeply satisfying for people who know and love Herbert’s Dune. And it’s unquestionable that parts of it are very cool and well-rendered. It’s also true that it feels like a whole lot of effort in service of too little payoff — a byproduct of being a “Part One” and having one of those literary plots that’s high on incident and low on story progression. Too much squeeze; not enough juice. That’s for round two.

My solution was to try and just let it all wash over me, details be damned. But as much as I tried, the movie doesn’t really let you just be swept away. Dramatic moments hinge on characters we barely know and lore about various factions. And, I will very much give Dune that it does a great job of visually coding its four main groups: the Normal Dudes, the Bald Albino Nutjobs, the Desert Nomads, and the Amoral Imperials. I never had any doubt about which group any character belonged to, though that did not mean I always understood who was doing what and why.

If you are reading this, you probably know the basics of Dune. In fact, I’d wager you know more about Dune than I do. But here’s a summary as I understand it. First, the most important world detail that is either not explained or so quickly comes and goes that it didn’t stick in my head: There are no computers in Dune’s world because of some sort of past AI revolution. Thus, calculations are done by hand, and the best way to do this is to get really high on a hyper-cognition drug called “spice” that can only be found on the desert planet of Arrakis. The product is thus a crucial piece of the wheels of modern industry, and Arrakis is a hotbed for violent insurrection. The planet is inhabited and operated by an imperial power commandeering sacred land of native people, and there’s squabbling over just which colonizing faction gets the power and profit of spice export. You don’t even need to squint to see the parallels between spice on Arrakis and oil in the Middle East. The imagery and even the story very much back the allegory up.

Parts of the lore and background story strike me as very stupid, or at least very uncinematic. The whole inciting incident is a confusing bit of politics: The Amoral Imperials take Arrakis rights away from the Bald Albino Nutjobs and give it to the Normal Dudes, but it’s all a ploy to secretly give it back to the Bald Albino Nutjobs and to take the Normal Dudes down a notch? Seems like a lot of work and a bit obtuse as the entryway to one of the supposed great sci-fi epics.

The spice drug itself, the central object of the drama, is kind of weird, too. Shoutout to my brother Will who talked me through a few of the finer details before we watched Part 2 together, but, as presented in the movie, the drug doesn’t really make too much sense. It makes you smart, but also you trip balls, and sometimes you can see the future and/or past. The nomad Fremen are constantly on a low-level spice high, yet despite the perceptive power I would expect this to grant them, they’re mostly clueless to the machinations affecting them and their world.

Also the hero is just a guy named Paul. There have been worse names for protagonists, but it was hilarious 100% of the time when some dramatic declaration was made about the chosen one, and he’s just Paul. You may as well call him “Rick from Home Depot” or “Bubba.” One of my favorite scenes in the movie is a montage of a prophetic vision of a holy war in the future. I was deeply into it, and then it ends with Zendaya staring at the camera and saying with all of the acting skill she could muster, in the most epic tenor possible… “Paul.” Like the main character’s name is some dramatic revelation. I burst out laughing. (Thankfully, Part 2 has a parallel scene with Anya Taylor-Joy saying “Paul” into the camera. Assuming Dune Messiah actually gets made, whether or not a beautiful woman say “Paul” directly to the audience is the lone criteria by which I will evaluate the film.)

My favorite bit of both worldbuilding and filmmaking is the giant sandworms. I love the idea of Lovecraftian creatures so terrifying that they disrupt basic life on the planet; the ground crumbling beneath inhabitants’ feet. And the way they’re filmed is terrific: giant, quivering, planet-reshaping orifices and phalluses, in case it wasn’t clear that this whole thing is also a coming-of-age story for our pal Paul.

The Part 1 story ends just as soon as the movie really starts picking up momentum. It amped me up for Part 2 because of how hard it teases payoff on setup. I guess this is a structural flaw to multi-part films; if I were looking at Dune Part 1 as a standalone thing, I’d punish it pretty harshly for its cuckoo barely-half-of-a-plot. There are some good scenes, like the death of Duncan Idaho (Jason Mamoa) and our first sighting of a sand worm, but I mostly felt teased. It’s strangely light on actual narrative thrust but also rushed — somehow a total of about seven total events happen across two and a half hours, yet it’s still choppy.

The acting is decent, but not to the level you’d hope given the talent within the ensemble. Timothee Chalamet doesn’t really sell me on Paul, though the unsympathetic characterization in the screenplay is more of a problem there than the acting. Zendaya is eye-poppingly beautiful and ethereal, but she really sounds just like Zendaya, star of 2012 Disney Channel Original Movie Frenemies, whenever she talks (very few times in Part 1).

Aside the lead and the romantic interest, the cast in this really is quite busted: Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Dave Bautista, Javier Bardem, David Dastmalchian, and Film Twitter darling Stephen McKinley Henderson are all solid. And then every filler role is some outstanding character actor. The star power popping off the screen is never less than dazzling.

The real show-stealer is Rebecca Ferguson as Paul’s mother Lady Jessica, who is a part of a secret society of mind control witches that have tendrils all throughout the universe. I find the organization and their goals to be a little bit implausible and hard to wrap my head around, but having Ferguson as their face automatically makes them interesting.

Through all these reactions to Dune’s world and the characters, I’ve noted barely a thought on the craft and scope of the filmmaking itself. It’s a testament to Villeneuve’s steady hand and prodigious skill that I can take Dune at face value. The budget is all up there on there on the screen: huge, sandy vistas; nifty ships and effects; brutal battles; awe-inspiring production. It’s not nearly as weird as it could and probably should be — Villeneuve’s storytelling and imagery are on the mechanical side for some far-out source material, though this probably helps with the accessibility — nor is it as lavishly beautiful as Villeneuve’s partnerships with Roger Deakins. But Dune is still a work of a consummate and exquisite professionalism.

In fact, I would be pleased if Villeneuve continued taking existing worlds and stories and rendering them for the screen with fastidious, lovely precision. (I frankly can’t imagine anyone better for tackling Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn books, for example.) I may be a bit cold to Dune as an overly-prescriptive, po-faced messiah story adaptation, but I respect the hell out of the craft.

Another reason that Blade Runner 2049 should not work is because Denis Villeneuve had not, prior to this film, suggested he had the capacity to make a film of the storytelling depth and precision that a follow-up to Blade Runner would require. To be fair, Arrival, the film he made immediately before it, is the closest he had come, so there’s at least an upward trajectory in place. But his modus operandi is a messy stew of setup, then a 2-by-4 across the forehead for a finale — often satisfying when the credits roll, occasionally frustrating in real-time, rarely offering a complete cinematic vision. He can do style and sweep, but the prospect of Villeneuve tackling a project requiring the delicate touch and unique flavor of a Blade Runner sequel seemed a likely recipe for disaster.

And the third-biggest reason that this film should not work is that it’s almost impossible to imagine a film that honors the immersive visual pleasures of the original, a towering achievement of production and set design and cinematography. If nothing else about Blade Runner sticks, it’s the way the movie feels just looking at it in motion.

On top of those three, there are plenty of reasons this movie could and should have failed, and yet it hasn’t. Blade Runner 2049 is a great film. Genuinely great. I almost can’t believe it. It gets around the sheer lunacy of being a Blade Runner sequel by crafting a totally separate scenario in the same world, with a new protagonist and a fresh maker-vs-man dilemma that still feels in spirit to the original.

As for Villeneuve, he unlocks a directing capability in this film that he did not previously indicate he had in him except for glimmers at a time. There are still some story loose ends, a perpetual Villeneuve issue, but they are better-hidden and largely unproblematic. That he sustains Blade Runner 2049 at a gripping level for the near-entirety of its 163 minutes is a minor miracle.

And for the last question, how to make a movie that is a visual achievement worthy of Blade Runner’s legacy? 2049, of course, doesn’t reach the original, but it goes further (and stranger) than we could ever have hoped. The trick was to unite a world-class set of visionary designers led by the greatest working cinematographer, Roger Deakins, at the peak of his power and giving him free reign to innovate some of the most brilliant and striking sci-fi vistas and environments ever put to celluloid. No biggie.

The story this time follows a new replicant hunter, named “K” (Ryan Gosling). Unlike the original Blade Runner, this protagonist is explicitly a replicant himself. Any identity ambiguity this time around comes from the mirror angle of the original: Is this android perhaps more human than he initially appears? Unlike Blade Runner, though, (at least in my reading of each film) Blade Runner 2049 offers a definitive answer to the question rather than letting it hang in the air as the credits roll.

Gosling is, at this point, a decent candidate for “this generation’s Harrison Ford”: a brutally handsome, reliably charming leading man who can do comedy, drama, and action. Both have a knack for finding great and/or massive films to be in. Gosling hasn’t starred in quite so many iconic franchises and genre films as Ford, but he’s getting there. Both have been in stone cold masterpieces, both always make their movies better, and both perfectly toe the line of playing variations of themselves while still bringing something unique to each role. Gosling is indeed excellent here, offering a pensive take on a replicant searching for some inner android humanity while still kicking ass.

After a terrific opening scene in which K hunts down a replicant played by Dave Bautista, K discovers that a replicant has secretly given birth, something previously believed to be impossible. Replicants having babies is apparently both believed technically impossible (though it’s never explained why a functioning uterus is more complicated than a sentient brain) and highly dangerous: just like Jurassic Park, if these things are reproducing in the wild, they can’t be tightly controlled by human masters.

K spends the rest of the movie trying to track down the replicant baby and its parents — ostensibly for the sake of an official investigation, though also as part of his own actualization. Meanwhile, businessman god figure Niander Wallace (Jared Leto) directs his replicant assistant Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) to keep tabs on K in order to find and exploit this chosen one child. Leto is kooky and delightful here, bringing a heightened fun to the billionaire villain that was missing from Joe Turkel’s Eldon Tyrell in the original.

I don’t think it’s really a spoiler to reveal that K ends up crossing paths with Deckard in the second half of this film. (I mean, Ford is in the poster on Letterboxd, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.) This is by far my least favorite part of the film. It would have been sufficient and reasonable to mention Deckard and let him play a role in the backstory. Giving Deckard and Rachael (Sean Young) prominent roles in this story is unnecessary fan service that sucks some momentum out of a film that could have used some trimming. Blade Runner 2049 clocks in at about 2 and three-quarters hours, and even though it moves briskly for such a runtime, some restraint would have helped, and cutting out the old-heads is where you could start. Deckard and Rachael don’t really add much to the story that couldn’t have been conveyed elsewhere, though I do really like the scene that Leto, Ford, and Young share.

It’s that bit of padding and shoehorning in of past figures that lowers Blade Runner 2049 from being one of the decade’s best films to just one of the year’s best. Deckard himself was never as important to his story as Han Solo was to Star Wars; he was merely a cipher to one of the great explorations of the meaning of personhood in modern society, so it’s not like this wouldn’t have been a proper Blade Runner film without him (though the Warner Bros. marketing department might have argued otherwise).

There is one aspect of Deckard and Rachael’s appearances that I am grateful about, though. Blade Runner 2049 goes out of its way not to do much to undermine or rewrite Deckard as we knew him in the original: the crucial replicant-vs.-man ambiguity, such that you might believe it exists in the first place, is thankfully untouched. We don’t really learn anything about the characters, their pasts, or their futures except as it directly informs Blade Runner 2049’s arc.

It’s really incredible how stunning this film looks. Egads. Deakins offers a strong contender for my favorite cinematography of the 2010s with tremendous creativity and some really innovative touches. A few settings have colors palates and lighting that render the film more as a tinted black-and-white film than a color film. I doubt any viewer will quickly forget the yellows and oranges of this film’s Las Vegas: It offers a toxic, arid noir patina like a sun-aged, sepia-toned photograph of Gatsby-style decadence from a long-lost jazz age. Elsewhere, indoor settings are flooded with blue-green as if the entire world is lit from a mainframe terminal. Long shot exteriors glow with eerie sunrise colors or haunting, empty grays as the mood requires. Masterpiece stuff.

The world is filled with world-class production design from Dennis Gassner, who constructs some phenomenally interesting sets and details, modernizing the futurism-classicism duality of the original while still making it feel whole with the franchise’s aesthetic. It’s never quite so busy or beautifully chaotic as the city streets of Blade Runner, but it’s still inspired and worthy of the Oscar nomination it received.

A combination of the worldbuilding, visual design, and carefully-sculpted narrative by Villeneuve result in a deeply immersive film: Like any detective story, it unfolds with discursions, but each one is richly compelling and essential to the tone. As the tension rises, so does the action. It’s only during aforementioned detour with Deckard that the gas leaks out of the balloon a bit.

The expansion of the “what is a man, and how can he face his maker” theme so poignant in the original is the introduction of sex and birth as the conduit and union between two entities. The ways in which one can be a lover are explored, as are the ways one can be a parent. Many of the key figures of this story are women, and each offers a lens onto the ways hyper-industrial society views (and inevitably consumes and destroys) the fairer sex. Some critics have misguidedly accused Blade Runner 2049 of being misogynist for depicting such a dystopia, but it’s pretty clearly a deconstruction of such: Women become Madonnas and whores, dehumanized as they fulfill their lot in life. Ana de Armas’s Joi, a sex assistant AI, provides some compelling thematic counterweight to the ideas swirling around the story: Her personhood is even fuzzier than the rest of the characters’; her fate more jarringly annihilative than the others’, too. This thread is assisted by a best-in-show performance from Armas, who is brilliantly believable as a facsimile human that you’d still fall in love with and project a soul upon despite her ever-present artificiality.

So while the central questions of Blade Runner 2049 are not quite so elemental and resonant as those of Blade Runner’s, they are their logical extensions, and just as enrapturing: Adam’s story only got interesting when Eve showed up, and the rest of the Bible wouldn’t have been possible without her. He wouldn’t have fallen from Eden without her; and yet he wouldn’t have transcended his conceived limitations.

In Blade Runner 2049, the quest for the womb becomes a quest for the self, and just like the child whom orphanage records show split into two, one boy and one girl, so K’s journey brings him to the blurry boundary of that which separates male and female; that which separates dreams from reality; and that which separates man and machine.

This contradiction is at the heart of Arrival. In fact, as Denis Villeneuve’s career shifted from Canada to Hollywood, the struggle between internal faith and external fate became not only his central filmmaking theme but, in some cases, the very structure of his storytelling: Incendies, Prisoners, and Sicario are all, to varying degrees, stories of a lone person’s spiritual and physical resistance against a larger, unstoppable force (a civil war, an unsolvable kidnapping, and the War on Drugs, respectively). Arrival both digs in deeper on this conflict and explodes it outward: linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is in a tug-of-war with the space-time continuum itself.

And just like all of Villeneuve’s movies through his first eight, Arrival is a bit sloppy in the narrative details of its ideas. As the film’s conclusion approaches, the director attempts to modulate between two very different kinds of sci-fi: first, a hard, procedural first contact story about decoding alien symbols and uniting nations; and, second, a spiritual journey towards self-actualization, as if the aliens are Moses bringing tablets down from Mount Sinai for Louise personally. In the last few minutes, Villeneuve almost entirely abandons the former theme in favor of the latter.

While surveying reviews and querying friends, I’ve learned that there is astonishingly little consensus about just how well this works: Some viewers are bowled over by the emotionality of the conclusion, how personal the alien’s message becomes. Others find the pivot cheesy and unsatisfying: a movie all about puzzling out a secret meaning from esoteric but objective symbols is resolved with a deus ex stella, a bit of space magic. This is exactly the uneasy tension that Villeneuve cultivates, and I find it more compelling than ever here, albeit still heavy-handed.

The story kicks off when a series of spaceships — shaped somewhere between an egg, a teardrop, and a fingernail; all thematically relevant symbols — appear across Earth. Louise Banks (Adams), a linguistics scholar, is recruited to try and decode the language of these seemingly non-violent aliens. When she arrives at the landing spot of one of the ships in Montana, the crew of soldiers and scientists — notably, all men — have had no luck extracting any meaningful communication from the alien creatures, but Louise manages to connect with them right away. She collaborates with physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) to turn obscure circular patterns into a recognizable language. Meanwhile, other nations are using different techniques to communicate with the aliens, but are all sharing their findings with a global network, and this collaboration results in the construction of a basic alien lexicon.

All of this is framed from Louise’s perspective, and we see in flashbacks that she is haunted by the grief of losing a child to some unnamed and incurable disease, perhaps cancer. She also divorces her unseen husband, a double whammy of recent loss that colors her alien investigations. The more time she spends with the aliens, the more she immerses herself in their language, and the more she dreams about her dying daughter and departed husband. When she brings up the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis — the supposition that our brains process the universe through mechanics informed by the languages we communicate in — we can infer that something about decoding the aliens’ language has shifted her perspective and drawn her deeper into her own soul in some way she can’t quite put her finger on.

It’s immensely satisfying to watch Adams communicate with the aliens and work towards the breakthrough to the big question: Why are they here? (And, perhaps, in turn: Why are we here?)The film, in these scenes, offers the satisfaction of a good procedural mystery, the pleasing sequence of watching great detectives solve a complex problem.

It gets messier in the third act. This hard sci-fi thread of the story hits a wall as soon as the movie decides it cares more about Louise and her personal demons: Arrival provides rushed closure on the grand, global puzzle it so meticulously sets up. And the result of this is the impression Villeneuve was baiting us a bit, that the entire first contact with aliens is ultimately about Louise processing her own grief rather than offering some broader insight into the human race. This doesn’t jibe with the scale of the story leading up to it. The film’s answer is ultimately that these aliens traveled lightyears to help Louise to make a couple of self-discoveries. This is a bit of a deflating ending.

The movie climaxes with Louise making a horizon-expanding revelation, a great sock-in-the-jaw twist with some real emotional heft to it. One friend said it made him “ugly cry,” and while I wouldn’t go that far, I still admired it. It’s a touching tribute to the overwhelming beauty of parenthood — the loss of self but the gaining of something more. The twist ending also provides just enough bong-hit, whoa-dude reality bending to scratch the itch for mindfuckery I always get when I start watching sci-fi. It is, in the spirit of Villeneuve’s past surprise endings, tinged with sadness, but it’s also the first one since Maelstrom that argues that love and human connection are worth the suffering.

Adams offers an absolutely phenomenal performance as the lead, anchoring the emotional journey her character goes through and bringing the audience along for the highs and lows. Adams brings some really tremendous vulnerability. It’s an awards-worthy turn. It’s also the only real performance of note in Arrival — everyone else is just backdrop for Adams’ bravura work.

With no Roger Deakins this time around, Arrival isn’t the stunning masterpiece of cinematography that Sicario or even Prisoners are, but it’s easily Villeneuve’s third-best-looking film through his first eight: Bradford Young turns in a gauzy, gray, earthy look punctuated by the rich black of the aliens and the oranges of the hazmat suits. The lighting is delicate and immersive. Shadows frequently fill the frame, suggesting unease without ever verging into anything expressionistic or overly sharp.

Arrival is overflowing with terrific imagery and symbolism, too: The aliens (cheekily nicknamed Abbot and Costello) are squid-like creatures that resemble hands, as if they are from a parent, reaching down to cradle humanity. An ever-present and unexplained twittering bird in a cage evokes both a crying baby and a canary in a coal mine, the tension of humanity on the precipice of either oblivion or a new maturity.

Arrival is a bit too uneven in its narrative balance and sloppy in its plotting to rise into a masterpiece, but it’s Villeneuve’s best of his first eight films. It shows his improving storytelling instincts and a knack for sweeping sci-fi, a genre he has continued to explore in each of his films since.

The difference is that Nolan is constantly trying to show you the niftiest clock he made, with all the glorious gears and components sliding together so cleanly that you didn’t even notice that one little bit over there setting up a perfect twist or breathtaking climax as he stands in the corner and smiles to himself at your joy. Early/mid-career Villeneuve, meanwhile, beats his fists bloody against the table, shouting until he’s hoarse, as his contraption does its trick so that you’re kind of distraught even when you’re impressed, and he seems to think his display of the dark underbelly of man made it all the more profound rather than tedious. I don’t know; this analogy is slipping away from me.

The point that I’m trying to get it at here is that Sicario is really terrific as a thriller qua thriller, simply an outstanding piece of cinema. It’s also just too obtuse and graceless in its messaging and cynical in its spirit for me to ever get really invested in it. I keep watching Villeneuve’s movies thinking that he’s just on the cusp of making his truly great film, the one where the emotions and the narrative are in perfect sync. The closest he’s come for me through his first seven films is Incendies, which has an emotional and storytelling sprawl to it with a compelling, albeit messy, interplay between violence being an alien force of global catastrophe and it being a personal, family-wrecking specter. Every other one of his films has miscalibrated one or more of its central features in some crippling fashion, and Sicario continues that trend.

I guess what bugs me is that Villeneuve tells us everything we need to know about the story and its characters and its morals in the first thirty minutes, then later treats what he’s already told us as some big revelation as he whacks the themes with a crowbar. Here are a few things Sicario has shown us by the end of the first shootout on the street, just over 30 minutes in: We know that FBI Agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is a “good cop” who’s going to lose herself in the violence and depravity of this War on Drugs that she has been recruited to help out with. (By the way, she’s written like she’s a rookie cop on her first day; is it really believable a seasoned FBI agent would be this naive or aghast at special operations teams functioning outside standard ethical protocol?) We also know that Alejandro Gillick (Benicio Del Toro) and Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) are monstrous, torturing, kill-first-talk-later rogues who have already lost said humanity and will try to take Macer down to their level. And we know this cycle of violence inherent in the “War on Drugs” is cruel and family-ruining and poisons everything it touches.

And then 75 minutes later, would you look at that, we have had all of those points demonstrated for us in explicit detail. The only questions we couldn’t have answered at the end of the first act is just how far Villeneuve would push this plot, and given that the most brutal scene of the film might be the opener, I’d say he doesn’t punish his characters nearly as much as he could have. Sicario certainly punishes the audience, though — this tops even Prisoners in its miserabilist, nihilist tone, cycles of violence spiraling into darker and darker abysses.

The one real surprise of the ending comes from a shift in perspective. Much of the final act centers around Del Toro’s Alejandro as much or more than Agent Macer. The first half of the film had suggested that Brolin’s casually cruel Graver would be the main antagonistic force and Alejandro would just be some counterweight, but that shifts strongly in the second half, such that Alejandro is the main moral casualty of the film’s cycle of violence. It’s what I liked most about the film’s ending from a character writing perspective, though it suggests a strange tension in the film’s moral perspective.

From a cinematic perspective and a thrills perspective? Holy shit, Villeneuve is on his game. The opener is a gut-wrenching corker of a home drug raid, ending with a cruel punchline. Scene after scene is shot with grit and tactility, and Villeneuve has just the right instincts for keeping us in the space of action while still making us feel overwhelmed with the chaos and danger, whether it’s a traffic jam, a bar hookup gone wrong, or an infiltration of a base. (The traffic jam confrontation is Sicario’s mini-masterpiece of tension and action staging.)

As always, Villeneuve gets some strong performances out of the cast. Blunt is eminently watchable and empathetic (not to mention outrageously beautiful) as Agent Macer, though she doesn’t take the two-dimensional character to any special places, and she can’t decide how much of a dummy Macer is. Brolin, too, doesn’t really add anything too surprising to the character of Graver as he’s written on the page, though he does deliver it with a heck of a lot of smarm and gravitas. The real standout among the key players is Del Toro, whose mercenary has cracks of sadness and regret to temper Alejandro’s quiet badassery.

But the real star of Sicario is Roger Deakins, who delivers a tour de force of cinematography. Sicario has some of the best photography in any film of the 2010s. Almost every scene you can pause and stare at the lighting and coloring and gorgeous geometry of a shot for the sheer aesthetics, and in every case it offers some sort of visual storytelling cue, too: the water-stained yellow interiors of the CIA office where covert torture and moral rot is happening; the harsh blue lighting of a nightclub where Agent Macer is feeling disoriented and displaced; the perilous stormy skies of a drug boss assassination attempt in turmoil. If there is a case that Sicario is an outright masterpiece, it lies in Deakins’ cinematography complementing Villeneuve’s thriller craftsmanship.

If only the film’s brains and heart could match its adrenaline and beauty, we’d be talking about an all-timer. It’s still pretty squarely a good film, but it only ever approaches greatness in a handful of moments, and the overall package is too dour and blunt to love. With every movie I’ve watched in my binge of Villeneuve’s filmography through Sicario, I keep telling myself that he’s close to making a great film. I’m crossing my fingers that he gets there with the sci-fi turn his career took after Sicario.

I even like the idea of Enemy’s story: Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal), a discontented and aloof college professor, discovers a person who is an exact mirror image of himself, right down to the same scar. This doppelganger, Anthony Claire (also Gyllenhaal) is an assertive and bossy failed actor, the inverse personality of the timid Bell. As Bell investigates Claire, the movie that starts as a thriller gradually drifts deeper into a dream logic and elliptical reality. All of that sounds like a pretty damn great hook to me!

So where does it go wrong? If I may be reductive, I’ll say that this a movie that wants to be a Lynchian odyssey and exploration of identity (like Mulholland Drive) but Villeneuve is not Lynch. Everything I love about surreality in filmmaking is missing from this film. As a piece of visual storytelling, it’s a bore: a piss-yellow monochrome bore staged in dull interiors, stagey and inert rather than sucking us in and daring us to enter Bell’s psyche. As a fable, Enemy it’s woefully on-the-nose, practically requiring you to read it symbolically rather than letting its messiness stand on its own. Great pieces of surreal filmmaking hold up whether you take them at absurdist face value or try to piece ithem together into something more. Face value is not an option here: Enemy tasks you with designing a crib sheet of themes — spiders mean THIS and sex clubs mean THAT.

I found the film’s ending to be especially frustrating. Parts of the final stretch are deeply intriguing and suggestive and ways I appreciated — two realities converging as the scenarios of Gyllenhaal’s two characters crash together more and more. And then, BAM. The movie throws a pie in your face with a jump scare dingbat final shot that amounts to Villeneuve doing jazz hands as he says “really makes ya think!” It practically railroads you into a specific reading about the nature of Bell and Claire, which I will elucidate in a spoiler box below (see the asterisk). Can I entirely reconcile my annoyance towards this ending with my total adoration of the twisted final act of Mulholland Drive or the film-reframing twist of The Usual Suspects? Maybe not entirely, and if I had seen Enemy at age 19 the way I did The Usual Suspects, I imagine I’d like it more. But Enemy is lazier than most movies that aim for a mind-bending mic drops. It sucks the air out of the scenario rather than exploding it into a million questions and possibilities.

The problem isn’t the performance at the heart of the film: Gyllenhaal does some terrific work playing two very distinct individuals that still have the right amount of blurry, overlapping edges. He also pulls that double-role-switch trick of playing characters pretending to be other characters, and making it obvious but not too obvious. He’s backed up by Melanie Laurent and Sarah Gadon as the various women in his life, who are both good; Gadon in particular is a bit of a revelation, vulnerable and terrifically expressive.

What is a problem, though, is the film’s look. As mentioned, this is a major disappointment in the cinematography front, flat with dull coloring, though one Villeneuve would bounce back from quite well. The next two films he made — Prisoners (shot later, released earlier) and Sicario — had Roger freaking Deakins executing some world-class lighting and visual composition on their behalf. The cinematographer of Enemy, Nicolas Bolduc, comes from a similar French Canadian background as Villeneuve — perhaps they networked as Villeneuve moved to Hollywood — but is not up to turning the film into anything memorable or pleasing visually.

But even more than the visual profile, it’s the writing and the sloppy characterization. While this world is certainly operating with a dreamy grasp of reality, the central mystery is not heightened by the characters’ inhuman behavior so much as it is crumpled into a heap. Why does anyone care that two people look sort of alike? Why aren’t we asking obvious questions about whether there was a hiccup at a sperm bank or perhaps two people go to the same barber and are both tall, generically handsome white guys? Why are we jumping straight to existential horror? The hooks to the story aren’t incisive enough to draw me in; I was stuck in an uncanny valley of watching people we assume to be human but don’t really act so.

And in spite of all my complaints, I still almost recommend Enemy. It’s a really interesting premise, poorly-staged but well-acted, and still provocative in its failures, likely to inspire a strong reaction, positive or negative. It makes for good post-movie discussion fodder. I would much more happily debate why this doesn’t work than I would defend why most movies I like do work. Hell, I’d even watch Enemy again with more excitement than plenty of movies I liked more. (That 93 minute runtime helps.)

But it’s still only an almost-recommendation. It doesn’t clear the bar. It’s just too much of narrative and visual misfire, with a patently ridiculous final payoff for a movie so built on intrigue that a dumb ending torpedoes the film.

And much like Incendies, it offers a stupid, fun final half hour dense with tension and surprises such that I ended up walking away with a positive reaction to the film despite recognizing that I’d just been played with the ol’ Villeneuve razzle-dazzle covering up a flawed thriller.

(To be fair, Villeneuve made Enemy before he made Prisoners even though the latter premiered first, so he had at least had at least one Hollywood go-round, with a very different kind of film, between Incendies and this.)

With Prisoners, Villeneuve is operating in a Finchian crime thriller mode instead of a novelistic family drama mode. The story kicks off with the disappearance of two young girls. Detective Loki (sigh; yes, that’s really his name) (Jake Gyllenhaal) arrests the mentally stunted Alex Jones (sigh; yes, that’s really his name) (Paul Dano), whose RV was near the scene of the disappearance. Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman), a father to one of the missing girls, locks in on Jones as the culprit for a number of reasons, the chief one being that Jones essentially admits it to Dover.

Thus we have the film’s two threads — Dover pursuing investigation and vigilante justice against the suspicious Jones, while Loki follows a bunch of strangely coincidental but seemingly unrelated leads in hope of a breakthrough on the location of the missing kids (or their bodies).

The first of these gives Jackman an acting showcase as a desperate dad. His extra-judicial work quickly boils down to torture, and it’s a brutal slog to get through, though Jackman brings a compelling sour nice-guy energy. The imagery and narrative evoke disturbing images and headlines from a decade earlier: US torture and indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. It’s filmed with a repetitive and hopeless rhythm that is surely the entire point.

Loki’s investigation, meanwhile, is at least fun to watch thanks to Gyllenhaal’s totally unmodulated performance. It appears as if the entirety of Villeneuve’s coaching to the actor was “take a swing, big boy,” because Jake brings a borderline-creepy intensity and a try-hard facial twitch just so we know he’s acting.

Villeneuve has become a master at sustaining tension, which is good, because this movie is interminable. It cracks two and a half hours, and you can feel that length in the exhaustingly slow drip of plot details during the middle act. And yet the only times I felt bored were during the torture scenes, as even thematically-purposeful torture is a chore to sit through.

As a craftsman and a steward of talent, Prisoners is an outstanding Hollywood debut for Villeneuve. (Though, again, it was actually his second production after Enemy.) His cast give extremely watchable performances even if they don’t all neatly fit together (re: Gyllenhaal’s much-ness). Even the supporting roles are filled with terrific actors doing strong work: Viola Davis, Terrence Howard, Melissa Leo, David Dastmalchian, and more.

Just as crucial is the film’s look, a haunted, almost fetid, look at dreary Mid-Atlantic suburbia. The visual profile is incredible — Roger Deakins turns in a masterclass that brings the world to life with decaying interior spaces and crowded exteriors, the humanity of a tortured town slowly suffocated.

But as a storyteller, Villeneuve remains careless in the details, though at least this time he can partially blame a script he didn’t pen. The story is chock full of idiocies and thoughtless details. Consider, for example, a scene where a Loki finds a desiccated corpse in the basement of a pedophile priest: Neither the screenplay nor Villeneuve show any interest in the specifics of this character or the logistics of this scenario: Is the killer still a priest, or is he defrocked? (He wears his collar, and Loki calls him “father.”) Does the corpse have a pungent smell? Why would the dead man, whom the priest claims confessed of abducting children, go out of his way to confess to that at the house of a convicted pedophile priest? Why would any confession happen at the house of a priest rather than a church? Why does the basement not have stairs?

Maybe these questions have answers we’re supposed to guess, or maybe they don’t: Villeneuve doesn’t care. And this is just one scene of many that inspire such head-scratching. This storytelling imprecision is much more of a distraction in Prisoners, a procedural-style crime mystery, than in the sprawling Incendies, which admittedly has just as many holes. This sloppiness in plotting also has the byproduct of making Loki seem like a pretty lousy detective when he waits so long to ask certain questions and notice certain connections.

Even though the subject material is not any more bleak, Prisoners still has a much more brutal impact than anything in Incendies, or really any of Villeneuve’s films prior to Prisoners. This is for a few reasons. The first is how much of the agony appears onscreen in Prisoners. Compare this to Incendies, where some (but not all) of the worst bits are left as suggestion; meanwhile, Prisoners shows, in detail, Paul Dano getting his head whaled to a swollen pulp. The second reason Prisoners is such a squirm to sit through is the nature of the crimes it’s about — violence against children is extremely troubling, and dwelling upon grieving parents makes it worse. (As a dad of two girls, I am of course particularly sensitive to the topic.) Overall, Prisoners feels more of an exercise in miserabilism than any of Villeneuve’s work prior to it, even the school shooting one.

And it could have been even worse. Villeneuve submitted a cut of the film to the MPAA at about three hours in length that was slapped with an NC-17 rating, which Villeneuve opted to trim down to get an R. The extra half hour supposedly contained more torture and some discussion of pedophilia that’s mostly left as subtext in Prisoners.

One last gripe, this one especially minor: Prisoners is such a stupid title for this film. If the subject of the investigation were prisoners, not missing children, it might work as an obvious but effective double meaning — after all, Loki and Dover are both prisoners of their own obsessions. But it just doesn’t make sense because there are no physical, literal prisoners in this movie. No prisons in sight. “Captives” might have made more sense, but even then, we as the audience don’t know whether or not there is, in fact, anyone being held captive for most of the runtime.

And yet, in spite of the film’s lugubrious nature — in spite of the general lack of narrative polish — what I circle back to is just how tense and engaged I was as I watched, especially towards the end of the runtime. He’s not as razor-precise or incisive as David Fincher as much as he wants to be, but Denis Villeneuve knows how to make a film even as a relative Hollywood neophyte. And the damnedest thing is that you can tell he’s really close to making a great film if he can just get the story and tone and texture right. He has all the chops but is missing the narrative instincts — fingers crossed he gets it in one of his next six films as my Villeneuve journey continues.

Personally, I think the tension works very well, if a bit nakedly. I was deeply engaged, though I did feel a little bit gross about it, like I knew Villeneuve was emotionally manipulating me and leveraging my biases. But Incendies is richer and more interesting than any of his films preceding it, and the sense that he’d made the audience into slimy gawkers doesn’t weigh down the whole film the way it does in Polytechnique. That’s partially a factor of my own baggage, sure, but it’s moreso in the perspective Villeneuve takes: He pulls away from the specifics and focuses instead on the broader ideas. He explores with vignettes how cultural and religious displacement cause fanatical violence — how they, more generally, obliterate healthy family bonds and societal structures. And when it culminates in a wild series of coincidences that drills the point home for twins Jeanne and Simon, it is a gut punch, connecting the protagonists (and, by proxy, the viewer) to the idea that these problems are our problems, even when it doesn’t seem like they’re happening right in our backyard. It’s a deeply imperfect film, but a stirring one, with one of those serpentine endings so ballsy you’ll be bowled over if you’re not rolling your eyes.

It helps that Villeneueve has blossomed as an excellent director, at least on a scene-by-scene basis. A few of these incidents are truly bone-rattling: The best scene in the film comes towards the middle of the film. There’s a violent encounter on a bus that is immensely upsetting. Villeneueve’s use of abrupt, gut-splitting violence in Polytechnique is transplanted here multiple times to equally startling effect.

Villeneueve remains a less accomplished writer and large-scale storyteller than director, though. He is at least blessed with a corker of a scenario, adapted from a play of the same name: Twins Jeanne (Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) are directed by their recently deceased mother’s will to find their father they’ve never met and a brother they didn’t even know existed, which means they need to return to the unspecified Levantine country from which their mother emigrated and retrace her life story.

The rest of the film alternates between the present and flashbacks of the life of the mother, Nawal (Lubna Azabal). This structure results in a lot of expository redundancy that Villeneueve is not quite up to navigating: The order in which the audience learns something about Nawal’s life as opposed to Jeanne and Simon seems arbitrary and rarely makes good use dramatic irony or well-timed surprises, with a few key exceptions. Regardless, he seems most concerned with maximizing the gut punches of the film’s final 45 minutes than the path leading up to it, with everything leading us there little breadcrumbs and snapshots.

Incendies has a novelistic sprawl to it that is immersive and compelling. Even when parts of it don’t add up (particularly a screwy chronology that doesn’t stand up to too much scrutiny), we always have a sense of the hugeness and scariness of Nawal’s life. It’s the third consecutive use of a nonlinear timeline by Villeneuve, who is fascinated with reframing truths in new lights in each of this, Polytechnique, and Maelstrom. It’s his most ambitious use of nonlinear timelines in these early films, and his most effective, though still sloppy.

The depiction of a war-torn cityscape has excellent production for an indie release, with sets of rubble and crumbling buildings and explosions filling the horizon. Villeneuve shot parts of the film in Jordan, but his script declines to name the country it’s set in. However, many of the details align with the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-90. You’ll see some sources cite Lebanon as the given setting of the film, but I think it’s important (and good) that we aren’t given a specific country as the setting, as it gives Villeneuve the breathing room to keep the story fabulistic and symbolic rather than bound to fact. We are not given a detailed political sketch of the scenario, but we infer that right-leaning Christians in power are facing resistance from Muslim rebels. Nawal is Christian by birth but sympathetic to the Muslims rather than the nationalists. This comes to a head in one of the film’s cruelly ironic moments: Nawal holds up a cross necklace shouting “I’m Christian! I’m Christian!” to avoid getting gunned down by religious zealots.

The acting is highlighted by Azabal as Nawal, who gives a wonderful performance of a woman both weary and persistent, her dignity always present even as the film subjects her to cruelty. I liked Desormeaux-Poulin and Gaudette as the twins in the present timeline, too — Desormeaux-Poulin gives a particularly haunting shriek when she makes an important realization towards the end of the film.

Incendies is a very bleak film. Villeneuve’s Quebecois quartet grows increasingly cynical about a black core of trauma at the heart of the human experience from film to film. They are unified around characters making sense of some aspect of their Canadian heritage and its bewildering mixing pot of cultures and values, but with a growing darkness to that theme. Incendies was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar (back before the Academy renamed it), and it was enough of a darling for Hollywood to come knocking at the Canadian director’s door.

Now that I’ve wrapped the Canadian stretch of his films, it’s more clear than ever that the four themes of Villeneuve’s storytelling I proposed in my Maelstrom review have held, at least through his Canadian era. Incendies certainly features all four: cyclic violence, actions with unpredictable and long-spanning consequences, empathy as a healing force, and the recontextualization of early scenes with new information for dramatic effect.

Though I’m excited to see where he goes from here, I’m also sad to lose the distinct Quebecois identity that Villeneuve brought to these films, even when the results were mixed. He leaves the Canadian film apparatus and the French language right on the cusp of greatness with the bleak, uneven, but immensely watchable Incendies.

I was an engineering student at Virginia Tech in 2007 when 32 students were killed in a shooting spree. I was a few hundred yards from both shooting incidents that April morning. At the time of the major shooting incident, I was skipping a class that was held one building over from Norris Hall, about a hundred feet from the chained doors. Two days earlier, I had been in the the dorm where the first shooting took place, as my good friend at the time lived there. Luckily, I was never really in harm’s way, so maybe “survivor” is not the correct term; I’ve never quite known the best term to label myself, but that’s a term people understand.

Three people I knew quite well were killed — my engineering lab instructor, Brian Bluhm; a friend who lived three rooms down from me in my dorm, Leslie Sherman; and a leader in the marching band with me, Ryan “Stack” Clark. It was indescribably surreal and sad when they died, basically incomprehensible to my 18-year-old brain. It was probably the closest brush with death I encountered until my father passed away just last year, 16 years later.

I ended up transferring to another college to finish my degree, though I had already applied to transfer before the shooting. The shooting and its aftermath weren’t direct reasons for my decision to accept the transfer offer a couple months later, though they were almost certainly an indirect ones. I had a lot of complicated feelings about my identity and trajectory at Virginia Tech that made me want a fresh start for my sophomore year.

Back to Polytechnique, Denis Villeneuve’s third film. It tells the story of a real-life mass shooting in 1989 at Polytechnique Montréal, a Canadian university. Over the course of about twenty minutes, fourteen people were murdered, all women. The film closely follows the killer and three of his victims on the day of the shooting in a realistic, docudrama style. The film highlights the killer’s anti-feminist rhetoric and actions.

I do not like Polytechnique, but I don’t think it is an outright bad film. It is pretty gripping to watch. It’s well-made on a technical level. Villeneuve and cinematographer Pierre Gill in particular make great use out of black and white: It lends the story an air of drama and sadness, and it serves a bunch of specific visual purposes, like transforming blood into a black visual void of darkness. Figures become more anonymous and muted in black and white, the killer’s face more ghost-like.

There are some interesting motifs in the script, too, which give just a little bit of shape and thematic purpose to the film: The parallel dictated letters at the beginning and the end of the film, showing two broken worldviews, one from totally imagined and false slights and revealing its writer’s violence, one from real trauma and revealing its writer’s empathy. Bizarre and compelling juxtapositions in the chaos and violence emerge, like when two survivors inadvertently traumatize the other — one thinking the other the killer and playing dead, the other thinking the first dead and breaking into uncontrollable grief.

Since my own baggage and moral reasoning with the material (which I will expound upon later in this review) may or may not match your own, I should point out that there are some material problems separate from my hand-wringing. The biggest one is the narrative structure. The shooting is an incident, not a story: Fitting it into feature length requires padding and additional contextualizing material to unnaturally stretch out a scenario. (This is the same issue I had with Sully, too.) Polytechnique uses an especially choppy nonlinear timeline that Villeneuve seems to have designed with a specific final image in mind (and it’s a good one), but a haphazard approach to getting there. The flashbacks and flash-forwards are tossed about rather incoherently.

The movie strikes two angles at once with regard to the killer. First, it shows his motivations as anti-feminist terrorism. Second, it shows his mental state as totally disconnected from the world. Acknowledging both of these as truths presents a problem, because it at once gives us a theme to galvanize around — feminism in traditionally male spaces is good — and simultaneously strips that theme away by suggesting none of the killer’s actions had any real meaning. I tend to think that the latter is the most valid reading, but even if you accept both, they kind of cancel each other out.

Villeneuve took nine years after Maelstrom to make this. He has said he used this time to work through various scripts, improving his craft at telling real human stories. This seems to me as a bit of backhanded criticism towards his first two films, both of which I like more than this. Those two are filled with just enough whimsy and adventurous images to suggest a world worth exploring and pondering more deeply. Polytechnique is a surface-level exercise of grief and outrage, though it does display a bit more humanism than his earlier works. But it’s to no better cinematic effect — his efforts to translate a real life event into a story that matches his own storytelling approach doesn’t really click.

But in spite of all of that, the movie just made me feel numb and exhausted. All I can think is why? Why tell this real life story in this way?

Long story short: The movie is transfixing, but it only offers morbid gawking and shallow reckoning. Be warned that the rest of this review is basically me purging many years of frustration and cynicism as I dig deeper into my thoughts on the matter. You can probably stop reading here and proceed with your day if you just navigated here for a take on a movie.

There are some good answers to the question of “why?” Art is not inherently bad because it finds no solution to complex problems it tackles. Sometimes it just tells a story or helps us remember; and given that this shooting occurred in a place and time that does and did not see many mass shootings, I get the impulse. There is value in unpacking real life tragedies even to just give ourselves space to think about them. I’m sure Polytechnique has provided some worth to some people in that regard. It is in our nature as humans to look at disorder — pointless acts like a mass shooting — and try to prescribe order and meaning, to try and process them in the way our human instincts and conditioning tell us to.

But sometimes senseless violence really is senseless. No insight can be gleaned except things we already know, like: shooting people is bad and feminism is good. We all know that, though, right? So, I wonder, why make this movie except morbid fascination? To be fair, expolitative sensationalism is a reason to make a movie (rarely a good one, but one with a lot of precedent), but that sort of indulgent violence-titillation not really the mission statement of Polytechnique. It intends to be informative, perhaps even palliative, and that is where it fails. Though we may feel the compulsion, staring and dwelling upon an act like this is neither therapeutic nor enlightening. It just makes you sad to no other ends.

As I worked through these thoughts for the thousandth time, it also occurred to me that not everyone might have already drawn these conclusions, as not everyone has spent so much of their life force as I have thinking about mass shootings. Certainly many Americans have. We have been drowned with school shooting headlines and thinkpieces and talking head analysis in the fifteen years since Polytechnique was released. Hell, a sizable portion of us have crossed paths with mass violence directly. So the idea that this film and the event it is memorializing offers some specific, unique sordid tale is simply not true, sad though that fact is. It’s just one more data point in a disturbingly normal pattern.

I, personally, have been drowned in the material for seventeen years now. Brushing so closely to violence like this, I’ve both consciously and subconsciously asked the questions this movie and those like it ask: What makes someone snap and resort to this? How did it unfold, and how did people feel as it did? What can be understood in those actions? How could it have gone differently if someone had taken some preventative action? For years and years I’ve pondered these questions, and I always end up deciding they don’t really have answers, or at least useful ones. Dwelling on it, minute by minute, killing by killing, one piece of evidence at a time, leaves me with a total vacuum of insight except that this killer was a deeply and fatally broken person, and I am sad about the violence that fact wrought.

To psychologically explore and relive these events is to douse yourself in nihilism to no gain. I have processed that. I’ve moved on as a happy person. I honestly don’t even think about that April day and its impact on me and my community all that much anymore unless something specific prompts it. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I was once near a mass shooting, I was physically unharmed, and I lost some friends as part of it. I don’t think I or anyone can get much value dwelling on it at this point. The loving memories with friends and the lingering sadness of a tragic loss, sure — those are important and offer value. But those aren’t the shooting itself, and those aren’t really what Polytechnique is about: This is a film about a real killer and the killing he did, and I have to be honest that I just don’t see much point in a movie like that.

At the end of the film, survivor Valerie (Karine Vanasse) suggests that she will teach her unborn child to be brave and to love, a counterpoint to the killer; as if this mass murder was a simple failure of empathy. I understand Villeneuve’s thought here, and the well-meaning optimism of plenty of people looking for some way to reduce these tragedies through putative individual acts of kindness and positivity. If violence is anti-love, then the opposite must be true: surely, love is a force that can curb violence.

But this honestly torpedoed whatever benefit of the doubt I was willing to lend Polytechnique. It inadvertently legitimizes killer’s act by suggesting it can be understood in logical terms and could have been corrected. Even the act of vilification empowers the figure of the shooter, who becomes in that moment the arbiter of life and death, the one who can snuff out a soul with the flick of a finger. It’s like that old Francis Truffaut chestnut but about school shootings.

Mass shootings like Virginia Tech and the Montreal massacre occur when people who are so poisoned and broken they have lost touch with reality and humanity get access to guns. Until large-scale systemic and societal change is implemented to address the underlying poison and breaking, it’s basically that simple and that impenetrable.

When we try to apply any explanation or meaning to a specific shooting beyond that, we dignify the senseless violence as an act of personal expression, even if we don’t mean to. It’s a tempting path to go down — to try and make sense of the demons haunting a broken soul so we can exorcise them, to capture them in print or on celluloid. But the end of that path reveals nothing but chaos and emptiness. I’ve read Seung-Hui Cho’s manifesto multiple times — nothing lies there except the ravings of someone with no connection to reality. No elucidation on what ailed him; no profound insight.

We cannot fix mass murders with mere interpersonal empathy and kindness because someone only commits this kind of violence if they are beyond the power human reasoning and healing influences. At that point, the most important action we can take is keeping deadly weapons out of their hands.

(And just so you know I’m not entirely thoughtless on the matter of solving the root cause: I do think there are widespread, systemic problems we can try to solve. We face large-scale societal issues that increase the frequency of these events, and those issues go beyond access to guns. The symptoms of these problems are widespread, more than just public acts of violence. These challenges can and should be tackled — mainly by public policy. Honestly, I don’t have fully-articulated remedies for what ails America, but I know we need to try. The one thing that’s clear is an immediate way we can drastically reduce mass shootings is by making sure people in an unwell state do not have guns. It doesn’t solve the root cause, but it at least staunches the flow.)

I’m sure that I’ll find myself in the minority on disliking this one. There is indeed some payoff from Villeneuve’s laser focus emotional intensity on a single, tragic, dramatic event (the time jumps are a lot less effective), especially with such a precise and muted aesthetic. But, overall, Polytechnique fails at anything other than pointing out that a tragedy did indeed happen, and it leaves me with a gaping hole in my gut that’s been all-too-familiar since 2007.