Custody

Custody can be difficult, even wrenching to watch, but it always plays fair with the audience, and the experience, worth every minute expended, is impossible to forget.

The intensity is too much to bear in the best possible way. Legrand knows exactly where to position his characters and what’s necessary to break them. It’s a steady crescendo of suspense despite his source of danger never shifting.

An almost unbearably-tense, no-holds-barred drive through the nightmare of domestic terrorism, Custody is a can’t-look-away hybrid of gruelling reality and heightened cinematic technique. The mix is jarring, as intended, and this wrenching, heart-stopping film illustrates domestic violence and obsession in a way that makes the fear real.

Knowingly blending realist grit with generic guile, this unrelentingly tense account of a fragmented family living in constant fear thoroughly merited the Best Director prize at the Venice Film Festival.

A peerless fusing of dumbshow performance and background sound editing, there's a rising panic that allows the final, violent closing act to seem shockingly organic.

Custody doesn’t do much more than plunge the audience into this hellish situation, but it shrewdly understands the bad dad’s pathetic pathology, and the film may resonate for anyone who’s grown up under the unhealthy supervision of a mean bastard. Take that as a sobering recommendation.

Custody is concerned with the failure of process to discern human need and perversion, and Xavier Legrand rather ironically follows in the footsteps of bureaucracy by reducing people to statistics.

A well-made film, tight and intense. The theme is somehow ordinary and predictable. Execution of acting and film-making is excellent. The boy actor is a stand-out.

There is no nuance to this film. One party is all good, the other all bad, and we are told nothing about how they got there, either individually or together. If we are to ponder how the French legal system handles cases like this, and if reforms are needed, we are offered no clue. The judge's decision is on the side of a phone conversation we don't get to hear. There is a subplot dealing with a pregnancy that is dropped completely. The party sequence is largely confounding; are the key characters bothered, disturbed, concerned, or just partying. Who knows? I watched this right after Marriage Story, which is far superior, with the depth I expected to see similarly here.

All the French food (movies) tastes the same. You either love them or hate them.