Azor

This superb debut feature from Andreas Fontana puts an ingenious spin on the paranoid thriller: its main character is determined to behave as if he isn’t in one.

Written and directed by Andreas Fontana, making a formally precise, tonally perfect feature debut, Azor is a low-key shocker.

Like the intelligent performances — both Rongione and Cléau are standouts — and the terrific art direction, the film’s design reinforces an exquisite, levelheaded decorum about to be smashed by a chillingly cruel monster.

It’s perhaps one or two increments too obscure, too puzzling and too unwilling to give anything away that it seems to end mid-sentence, without any traditional closure. Yet it’s still a bold work that puts great faith in its cast to play along with this game of chilling insouciance.

To the less patient viewer, the lack of clarity on the finer points of high finance and characters’ backgrounds and not getting period-orienting news updates about the political situation, might seem confounding. But Azor works without them, because those details would only disrupt the artfully portentous chill Fontana gets from the pitch-perfect performances and design, and Gabriel Sandru’s cinematography.

With its elegantly restrained cinematography, exquisitely understated performances, and quietly sumptuous production design, Azor embodies the same well-mannered urbanity as its protagonist.

Conceptually, Azor, is brilliant and its dreamlike editing that joins one meeting to the next with little connective tissue is often intriguing. But as a viewing experience, it is roundly obtuse with a repetitious, meandering narrative.