(The Ordeal, The Intruder)
A lot more fun – in the macabre scheme of things at least – than its unenticing title lets on, Fabrice du Welz’s The Ordeal maybe the hidden jewel of the That’s Incredible Cinema section. It’s one of the better, more interesting recent forays into the backwoods subgenre (which I am quite partial to), a black comedy-cum-rural nightmare that takes the perennially pillaged crazed-yokel milieu of Deliverance and whisks it into a savagely warped Polanski-inspired delight.

At times stubbornly ambiguous, The Ordeal does deliver on the genre’s cruel pleasures, with cross-dressing, bestiality and crucifixion thrown into the mix, and an intensity that accumulates with every setpiece until a climactic discharge of Straw Dogs-style bloodletting. The grainy, tremendously atmospheric Super 16 cinematography by Benoit Debie (Irréversible) emulates the look of low-budget ‘70s regional horror better than I could ever have imagined.

It’s difficult to explain how willfully dislodged from narrative convention Claire Denis’ The Intruder is. It’s fucking abstract. And beautiful. You could say it’s about a man’s globe-trotting attempts to get a heart transplant and find his long-lost son, but that shortchanges Denis’ hypnotic, elliptical, commercially legless vision and its severe resistance to spoon-fed storytelling. Parts threaten to burst into an espionage thriller of some sort, others vanish into an existential ether. The initial effect feels trapped somewhere between David Lynch’s non-sequitur free-association and Bruno Dumont’s poker-faced shock tactics. Yet that seems too easy and superficial. It’s a cliche to say this, but The Intruder most resembles a dream: beautifully meandering, fluidly unspooling, and engaging the subconscious with its evocatively switching landscapes, dissolving plot threads and lucid scope cinematography. Great score by Tindersticks’ Stuart Staples, who orchestrates ominous shards of discordant melody that recalls Neil Young’s work on Dead Man. Don’t miss this one, ‘cos it ain’t returning.—AY