Cus­tody

This poi­so­nous lit­tle debut fea­ture from French direc­tor Xavier Legrand is a long-fanged genre piece kit­ted out in sheep’s cloth­ing. Its open­ing act offers a fan dance of sub­tle mis­di­rec­tion and teas­ing obfus­ca­tion, as a war­ring cou­ple engage in a bit­ter cus­tody bat­tle over­seen by a har­ried mag­is­trate. In the red cor­ner, there’s Léa Drucker’s cow­er­ing fawn Miri­am, who wants noth­ing more than to be rid of her alleged­ly vile and over­bear­ing husband.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly for her, she doesn’t quite have the courage to just say these words in a room full of lawyers. In the blue cor­ner, there’s seething man-hulk Antoine (Denis Ménochet), who resem­bles a melan­cholic, gone-to-seed prize­fight­er. His tiny, pierc­ing eyes and petit facial fea­tures serve to cloak any out­ward emo­tion, mak­ing it even tougher, ini­tial­ly, to know whose side to take.

Despite state­ments from his chil­dren that they no longer want to spend time with him and var­i­ous accu­sa­tions of abuse, Antoine calls con­spir­a­cy and claims that Miri­am is a mas­ter manip­u­la­tor who has turned his brood against him. Even though the case seems to be weight­ed heav­i­ly in Miriam’s favour, the judge inex­plic­a­bly awards a grate­ful Antoine week­end vis­it­ing rights. As that extend­ed pro­logue comes to an abrupt, almost busi­ness-like close, every­thing is laid bare.

Cus­tody is a direct sequel to Legrand’s 2013 short, Just Before Los­ing Every­thing, which charts Miriam’s ini­tial attempts to break free from her qua­si-psy­chot­ic spouse. While there’s some ini­tial ambi­gu­i­ty in a film about which par­ent we should be root­ing for as as objec­tive observers, the ball drops fair­ly swift­ly when it’s revealed that Antoine is, in fact, an obses­sive psy­chopath of the Jack Tor­rence vari­ety, and sundry car­nage ensues. Any sense that the film is inter­est­ed in deal­ing with the emo­tion­al shades of grey that come from domes­tic dis­putes is tossed aside for some nice­ly exe­cut­ed stalk-and-slash busi­ness as Antoine los­es his shit in a very pub­lic way.

Where the film deliv­ers on the thrills front, it doesn’t appear to offer much insight into the untan­gling of a rela­tion­ship or how children’s lives are neg­a­tive­ly affect­ed by the actions of a hos­tile par­ent. Where Legrand excels is in the way he deals with space and the phys­i­cal dis­tance between char­ac­ters. Just as in Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shin­ing, where you always have a sense of the pro­tag­o­nists’ pres­ence, both on and off screen, the same goes here when Antoine begins chas­ing his ter­ri­fied young son across a hous­ing estate before back­ing down and retreat­ing to his car.

As you wit­ness the extent of Antoine’s mania, it become hard­er to believe that a judge would have orig­i­nal­ly allowed him even lim­it­ed access to chil­dren, but maybe that’s the point. Humans – not just extreme­ly vio­lent men – can pull down a cloak­ing device which hides their inner rage, and no judge in the land can see through it at the vital moment. This is an impres­sive first film, and it will be inter­est­ing to see if Legrand’s path takes him towards more cut-and-dried hor­ror, or the chin-strokey, cyn­i­cal social real­ist art movie at which direc­tors like Michael Haneke excel.