Directed by Albert Serra | 165 mins | 2022
Serra’s mesmerizing portrait of a French bureaucrat’s (Benoît Magimel) visit to a French Polynesian island charts the uneasy relationships between his autocratic yet avuncular High Commissioner and the Indigenous locals under his faux-benevolent thumb. With anxieties recently flamed by rumors of the return of nuclear testing by the French government, the Catalan filmmaker’s slow-building, hypnotic fever dream surfaces incisive commentary about the remnants of colonialism through quiet observation, jaw-dropping shots, and sheer aesthetic audacity.