Sombre – (Philippe Grandrieux , 1998)
Never has romance and menace looked more charged, or more interchangeable: Sombre deliciously toys with expectation as it unfolds like the blade of a knife from its handle. Vicious, unwaveringly intense and bleak, Grandrieux’s stuttering close-up shots recall the amateur realism of on-the-ground disaster footage — pregnant with seizure and fury — while his shifting storyline (which follows a killer stalking a young woman through the Alps during the Tour de France) indiscriminately spits uncertainty and blame.
Sombre mixes a straightforward narrative with a filmic intensity – that's as unforgiving in its clarity as it is loaded with the potentiality of threat – to tell the diametric opposite of a love story in which each shot is an atomic pile of implied violence and trauma.
TR