Catherine Breillat’s first film in ten years—a remake of the Danish film Queen of Hearts (2019) as commissioned by the bravura French producer Saïd Ben Saïd—takes great pains to contextualize the central affair between a lawyer (Léa Drucker) and her stepson (Samuel Kircher) as, if not immoral, then as the culmination of a long string of events whose linkages remain eminently intuitive. Each interaction, both between them and with the aging man (Olivier Rabourdin) and adopted Chinese children caught in the middle, is developed as to always embody both an image of conformity and a thrilling danger, and it is in this nether space that Drucker’s performance, poised one moment and completely enthralled the next, defines the pivots that the film takes. Never entirely cold but always hard-edged and wary, Breillat’s unpredictable orchestration of these events—even going so far as to include some ruminative scenes of driving set to guitar music by Kim Gordon—culminates in a staggering closing fade, a sculpting of light whose final spark is as cannily ambiguous as any image in recent memory.

From its first images, Angela Schanelec’s very loose rendition of the Oedipus myth refuses a clear-cut relationship between its borrowed motifs—the central tangled relationships, the swollen feet, the transference of a child—and their place within the collection of experiences that this film so mystically embodies. Aside from perhaps a few glimpsed and overheard words, it is unclear until around the 30-minute mark that the film predominately takes place in Greece, and there is perhaps only one conversation in this largely dialogue-free film with real narrative import. Instead, what transpires is the development of an entire world with only a few characters, etching out how its central protagonist lives after an act of inexplicable violence and tracing, with a surprising lightness and care, the process of forgiveness and redemption. Its eponymous artform is on display throughout but bursts forth in an extraordinary extended coda, whose shockingly sincere performances create a sudden expansion in Schanelec’s rigorous framework. The film evokes a renewal that, rather than sweeping past pains under the rug, brings them to reflective, graceful light.