Written and Directed by Michel Franco | 98 min | ▲▲▲▲ | On VOD and Hoopla

The filmmaker who gave us the quietly powerful Memory now delivers a chilly, erotic tale of obsession: a Mexican migrant and dancer, Fernando (Isaac Hernández), is in love with a wealthy San Francisco woman, Jennifer (Jessica Chastain). She tries to hide her relationship with him from her brother and father (Rupert Friend and Marshall Bell) with whom she works on a charitable foundation, but Fernando doesn’t want to hide, and he leaves her. What follows is a largely internal drama carried by Chastain’s performance as she uses her considerable resources to find him and rekindle their relationship, though with her ongoing, fundamental insistence on compartmentalization.

Franco is fond of medium and wide shots keeping Chastain isolated in the frame, with the occasional close up on her face that says so much by withholding everything. This while Hernández is an astonishing dancer and physical presence all around. The film touches on liberal, white privilege, power imbalances, American political realities, unspoken racism, and measures of control, while delivering sharp points of sexuality and violence that shatter against the film’s distance. Some may find those emotional blows a shock given the stretches of austerity, but keep in mind where this starts: a truck full of human beings, trapped, screaming in the dark.