The Dardenne Brothers revisit an underworld of human transactions. By DAVID LEVINSON. (contains spoilers)

FOR ALL their nominal prestige, there’s a welcome lack of pomp surrounding the event of a new Dardennes’ film. Maybe it’s because, unlike the Coens – whose in-house pecking order sees to the divvying up of writing, but not directing duties – the Belgian duo enact their craft under the same industrious anonymity that informs their characters. Whatever the case, Lorna’s Silence, their latest collaboration, opens on familiar terms – with a nod to Bresson: Mimicking L’Argent, we witness a cluster of Euros changing hands, unspooling a bleak scenario that finds the title character hitched to a junkie named Claudy (Jeremie Renier) in order to gain citizenship. Strictly a formal arrangement, the pair cohabit a flat in Liège, where – hair cropped boyishly close – Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) flaunts an obvious lack of empathy over her spouse’s struggle to give up heroin. (More salient, as it turns out, than her steppingstone existence as an alien-bride, is the one she pictures alongside her thuggish boyfriend Sokol (Alban Ukaj), with whom she dreams of opening a snack bar.) But Lorna, like Claudy, is just another pawn in a plot overseen by Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione) – a shadowy cab driver who, after removing Claudy via a forced overdose, seeks to marry her off to a mafioso known as “the Russian.”

Like their 2005 film The Child, Lorna’s Silence uses the sale of bodies as shorthand for a desperate sub-order – one whose collapsed territories fall under the lonely grip of the Euro. As viewers, our sole entry point into that world remains Lorna: Shunning omniscience, the brothers purposely muddy character relations, in a bid to lock us into the mindset of their flailing heroine. But where as, in the past, that tactic has been used to devastating ends, the web of crime surrounding Lorna – and her standing within it – prove to be intuitively simple: that is, she treats Claudy with contempt for no other reason than his co-dependence – suddenly awoken to his humanity by his impending death.

As such, a chism is aroused, draining the impact from a crucial turning point in in which Lorna strips down and fucks Claudy during the throes of withdrawal. Before any tendrils of affection can emerge, however, Claudy is killed, and what ensues is the typical spur towards redemption, only with an added twist: When the resultant guilt proves to be too much, Lorna is sent reeling into a kind of punch-drunk martyrdom in which she becomes convinced – against all medical reasoning – that she’s carrying his unborn child. As played by newcomer Dobroshi, Lorna is a pleasure to behold – magnetically shuffling between open vulnerability and devout resilience. But the Dardennes’ ascent into a delusional spiritualism feels off: Their films are at their best when they reframe Christian tropes of sin and forgiveness as a fraught exchange between two individuals; here, absolved of the source of her anxiety, Lorna simply feels like a tool in some God’s-eye prank.