If you break film down into the smallest possible grammatical units, then there’s a very good argument for saying that French director Claire Denis (with considerable assistance from DoP Agnes Godard) is the planet’s greatest living filmmaker. At the level of the shot – her entrancing, gorgeous, expansive sweeps with the camera – few could claim to compete. The Intruder moves even further into this terrain of pure cinema than such predecessors as Beau Travail or Vendredi Soir, but its free-flowing visual poetry ultimately has little to ground it.
Adapted from philosopher Jean Luc Nancy’s account of his heart transplant, The Intruder follows Denis regular Michel Subor as a Swiss farmer who pays for a new heart before travelling to South Korea and Tahiti in search of his son. These already wilfully obscure proceedings are further clouded by the presence of a strange stalking Russian woman, a son back in Switzerland (Colin) and a majestic Alpine dog-breeder (Dalle), billed as The Queen Of The Northern Hemisphere.
As a sensorial experience, the film has bags of merit. Hypnotic images pile up to the strains of Stuart Staples’ impeccably minimalist score and any film depicting Beatrice Dalle surrounded by wolves and wild dogs is okay by me. But The Intruder’s detachment from narrative or any kind of levity proves a little too chilly and academic, not to mention frustrating. All this useless beauty. Pity.