A Silence: thought-provoking family drama is woven into chilling tale of murder

In A Silence, Daniel Auteuil plays a lawyer based on Belgian Victor Hissel, who represented parents of children murdered by serial killer Marc Dutroux.

Daniel Auteuil plays high-profile lawyer Francois Schaar in A Silence.

Astrid Schaar (Emmanuelle Devos) is driving through city streets. We see her face only in the rear-view mirror. She looks tired and stressed. She pulls up outside a police station.

This is the sustained opening of A Silence, a powerful, meticulously crafted, superbly acted drama directed and co-written by Belgian filmmaker Joachim Lafosse.

Astrid, wife of high-profile lawyer Francois Schaar (Daniel Auteuil), is looking backwards, into the past, into the silences, hers and others. Her husband is central to this denial. This opening scene is set in the present. We then shift to the near past.

The media is camped outside Francois and Astrid’s palatial estate, which includes a tennis court and swimming pool. Their adopted teenage son, Raphael (newcomer Matthieu Galoux), lives with them.

The journalists are there because Francois is representing the parents of children kidnapped, raped and murdered by a serial killer. In regular pieces-to-camera he lambastes the police and the judiciary.

He’s considered a hero. It’s clear, though, that something is not quite right at home. Francois and Astrid, married for 30 years, have a tepid relationship. Raphael is in trouble at school.

The director and lead actors, two stars of French cinema, build the tension layer by layer with undramatic moments that swell with internal drama. Astrid wakes from a nap by the pool and bursts into tears. What was she dreaming? Raphael swims laps underwater, not rising for air. Why is he holding his breath?

The couple’s adult daughter, Caroline (Louise Chevillote), who has a young son, refuses to come to the house. Another relative, Pierre (Damien Bonnard), who as a teenager “adored” Francois, says his “stomach turns” every time he sees him on TV.

And Francois, investigating a man who raped and killed children, looks at material on a laptop he forbids anyone else to use. We don’t see what he sees but it sounds sexual and violent. He says it’s central to his case. Auteuil is brilliant at such moments and throughout the film, as is Devos.

It’s Pierre who asks Astrid whether she is silent because to be otherwise would end her comfortable life. Francois’s own silence involves self-control, or self-denial. “I don’t want you to see those horrors,” he tells his wife and son about what’s on that laptop. The son has a silence of his own.

This film, set in the French town of Metz in the early 2000s, is based on the real case of Belgian lawyer Victor Hissel, who represented parents of children who were victims of Belgian serial killer Marc Dutroux. If you know about that case, and Hissel’s involvement, you will know the story, which the director lightly fictionalises. If you do not, you will quickly learn about it. The director does not hold everything back for a climactic reveal. Early on, we know the reason for the silences. The question is whether someone will break them.

Near the end, we see Astrid in close-up. No rear-view mirror. It’s a perfect bookend to this compelling, thought-provoking drama, which has similarities to the director’s drawn-from-life 2012 film, Our Children, centred on a mother who murdered her five children. The police, the courts and the media are involved, but it’s the domestic intricacies that hold the director’s interest.

This film ends at a certain point in an ongoing story. My mother and I left the cinema full of questions about what happened to the real-life characters at the time and in the years since. The case is not well-known outside Belgium and France so it takes a bit of online digging but it’s worth the effort, especially regarding the son, whose real name is Romain Hissel. There’s a whole other film in his story.

A Silence (MA15+)

French language with English subtitles
101 minutes
In cinemas

★★★½