Polytechnique Review

This is the film that made Villeneuve's reputation at home, and it is the hardest of his to sit through. He shoots the 1989 killing of fourteen women at a Montreal engineering school in high contrast black and white, with long gliding takes down corridors and almost no score, and he withholds the release that a conventional drama would supply. There is no investigation, no trial, no arc of recovery. Instead there are three vantage points, a woman who survives, a man who leaves the room when ordered to and cannot live with it, and the killer himself, whose misogynist letter is read in voiceover.

That last choice was argued about fiercely in Quebec, and the argument is fair. Giving a murderer his own narration risks the coherence he wanted, and the film's answer, that the women are given faces and he is barely given one, is a defence rather than a settlement. The formal beauty also sits uneasily against the subject, deliberately so. It is short, austere and unforgettable, and it does not want your admiration.