Inexorable

This intruder in the family scheme is not new at all. In American and European films industries, I have already seen this numerous times. But here Fabrice Du Welz is in his element. Benoit Poelvoorde too. Those two -actor and director - seem to fit together as Tod Browning and Lon Chaney one century ago, like the bullet fits with the gun barrel. Both Belgian and I am sure they will work together again in the future. Weird, twisted stories, disturbing, more or less nasty on several scenes. Remember ALLELUIA in 2014, not with the same actores, I admit, but with also the same slow and tragic progression to doom. This movie is one of my Fabrice Du Welz' favourite with CALVAIRE, ALLELUIA and of course COLT 45, which has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the director's filmography. Remember that COLT 45 was a doomed, an evil experience for Du Welz; he was traumatized by the shooting, it was a pure nightmare for him. And it was an awesome crime flick. So, back to INEXORABLE, we feel here that Du Welz is again perfectly comfortable in this dark, gloomy tale.

The intrusion genre is not new. And I would not say that this offers too many new things for the viewer. What it does though: it tells the story as good as it gets. And it gives our "villain" the motivation and backstory needed. We kind of expect certain things from a genre entry like this one. And I would say that it fulfills those expectations.

There is moral bankruptcy and there is other things that might rub you the wrong way ... which may work in favor of the movie or not. Depending on how you will be able to process them. Not really surprising, but with an ending that I didn't expect like that either. Really good performances and the movie really takes as much from the story as it is able to.

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.