The Unspeakable Act

Perverse, funny, and ultimately profound.

Mr. Sallitt lays down a customarily restrained mode of acting (the kind that somehow seems less flat and more natural in French cinema), but it’s in the service of a rare lucidity about feeling.

Writer-director Dan Sallitt's fourth feature moves with confident boldness from the incestuous gauntlet its prologue impishly hurls down.

There's more than enough going on here to compensate for the script's occasional tendency towards on-the-nose exposition of feelings, and evasive contrivances.

You couldn’t accuse the cast members of being good actors, yet this young performer knows exactly how to express Jackie’s confusion, vulnerability, instability and longing without any sense of judgment; the film would simply not work without her, no matter how sensitively Sallitt handles such provocative, ick-producing bait.