Portraits that stare back, and won't let you look away

Whether it finds the audience it deserves is another matter. But those who do find it will, I suspect, hold on to it for a long time.

It begins quietly, almost apologetically, and for the first 20 minutes you may wonder whether anything is going to happen at all. Then something does, and from that point on it is impossible to look away.

Nothing is wasted. Every shot, every line, every silence is doing something

What makes it remarkable is not the plot, which could be summarised in a sentence, but the precision with which every element has been arranged. Nothing is wasted. Every shot, every line, every silence is doing something.

The central performance is a marvel of restraint. There are no big speeches, no obvious moments of catharsis, just a slow accumulation of small choices that, by the end, has become almost unbearably moving.

A singular vision

"I wanted it to feel like a memory," the director told me when we met in a cafe near the festival venue. "Not a story somebody is telling you, but something you half remember happening to you."

There are flaws, of course. The middle section sags slightly, and a subplot involving a neighbour is introduced with some care and then simply abandoned. But these are quibbles about a work that is, in every important respect, alive.

It is also, and this should not be underestimated, very funny. The humour comes from character rather than jokes, and it arrives exactly when the tension needs releasing.

The ending will divide people. Some will find it too abrupt, others too neat. I found it exactly right: an answer to a question the film had been asking, very quietly, from the beginning.