Surprisingly entertaining movie about boring people spending their boring lives in a boring greyish little French town close to the coast (Bailleul) while the investigation of an impacting rape and murder case of an 11-year-old girl takes place.

The normal procedure for a film of such premise would be centred around the crime investigation, even more so when our main protagonist Pharaon de Winter (fictional great grandson of the real-life painter of the same name played by Emmanuel Schotté) is a police lieutenant investigating the case. But, on the other hand, what we have is, specially at the beginning of the film, a series of vignettes with him and his two friends Domino (Séverine Caneele) and Joseph (Philippe Tullier) who is maybe the most impetuous of all.

Those three characters, as well as all the rest, are basically boring people not conventional, since even if you are conventional, you would have some especial trait or distinctive feature that differentiate you from the rest making you unique, but simply boring people. The ways in which they go out and have fun, the way in which they work, the way in which they have sex just feels routinary and, there I say it again, bo-ring.

Progressively, once we have got to know better our main characters, the movie starts to get more and more immersed into the case itself. Again, in common moviemaking the investigation would. even if slowly, advance. Various tips and leads would start appearing in order to find the culprit and bring closure, but this is not your common movie, the police investigation on the contrary feels completely pointless and without any progress.

The only thing that we truly get to learn from it is why our lead protagonist is, maybe, the way it is. A tragic event of his past seems to have stripped him from any capacity to show any feelings, those only come to light when he sees someone else also in pain, that is when his deep empathy for the unfortunate ones is openly revealed.

In the end, before you are maybe wondering if we reach a conclusion to the crime or not considering the nature of the film, just a short answer: yes, we have closure. Once again, not the most conventional one but nonetheless more than satisfactory and in accordance with the mood and what we have been watching for the past two hours.

So, even though of course the risky approach of using such an unattractive setting and characters takes a toll in the overall film, as you might stop paying complete attention from time to time and on certain scenes. Director Bruno Dumont accomplishes something very unusual, which is moving away completely from the schemes of the kind of police investigation genre with completely different development and characters while still provide an entertaining and curious film worthy of watching as it shows that ground-breaking cinema not only comes from a visual standpoint but also from how you approach storytelling.