Inexorable is a film that paints the picture of the lives of an upper bourgeois family and how those lives are changed when a hitherto unknown woman shows up on the large property that the wife has recently inherited. The film is interesting because the setting of a chateau in the country feels old and hearkens back to perhaps predictable tropes of an affair, a murder, a squabble with a servant, et cetera, but the film subverts those expectations with modern details.
I won't spoil the ending here, but essentially Marcel is a famous writer and his wife Jeanne, who pursued him, is the daughter of a wealthy publisher (described in French as an editor). They have a young daughter, and it is through this daughter that they meet the mysterious young Gloria, who claims to be a native who recently returned to the area. Jeanne inexplicably offers Gloria a job and a rent-free bedroom in the chateau soon after meeting her.
The strong points of the film are the performances of the cast and the beautiful setting of the castle in the wooded countryside, practically a member of the cast itself. The primary weakness of Inexorable is that the ending suggests a tragedy, but it's more a tragedy of the Oedipal variety in which everyone has behaved badly and is unlikable. It's almost a lesson to writers on why making the characters unlikable can pose a problem for most audiences. The audience needs at least one person to root for. All in all, the film was definitely watchable and memorable, mostly because it was better filmed than other films that I've seen recently. There's also an honesty to the film, which I associate with European films in general, but the film ultimately fails as a tragedy because the characters are sort of anonymous rich people and you don't care enough about them to be saddened when they meet their fates. And perhaps that's the point.
