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.