Curling: grips in ways a standard Hollywood thriller can’t manage (Review)

So do Second Run have some kind of insider knowledge, or…? Their first all-new release of 2020 (after a welcome Blu-Ray upgrade for Valerie and Her Week of Wonders) is Denis Côté’s Curling, a spare, paranoid film about self-isolation, home-schooling and precarious minimum-wage jobs. A rare chance for British audiences to see the Canadian director’s increasingly acclaimed work (New Wave Films’s 2016 double-pack of Joy of Man’s Desiring and Bestiary are the only other films of his that have received a UK release) it could be classed as an essential purchase. Just order it online, OK?

Curling is the story of Jean-François, a bowling-alley employee with a sullen demeanour that remains fixed in place even when he’s dressed as a giant bowling pin for a children’s party. He keeps his daughter, Julyvonne, sequestered indoors for reasons that are initially mysterious. Even when you don’t know the full story – and Côté keeps the revelations unspooling well into the final half-hour – it’s possible to sympathise with Jean-François. The outside world in Curling is an inhospitable place, from the snow-lashed road in the film’s extraordinary title sequence to Jean-François’s boss, a repellent lech who refuses to call his employee by any name other than “Moustache”.

It’s also easy to sympathise with him because he’s played by Emmanuel Bilodeau, a fine actor with a long string of lead and supporting roles in Québécois films, but whose only international role is a small part as a French interpreter in The Revenant. Côté has worked with non-professional actors before – most notably in 2009’s Carcasses, which featured several child performers with Downs’ syndrome – but in Bilodeau he finds a star who can give the kind of completely unaffected performance that could fit into an early film by Herzog or Dumont. The rest of the cast are no less convincing, particularly his real-life daughter Philoméne as Julyvonne, and Sophie Desmarais as Isabelle, a pretty young Goth who attracts the unwanted attentions of Jean-François’s boss.

A quote from the Guardian on the back cover compares Curling to Psycho, though the film it reminded me most of was Fargo, and not just for the inclement weather. Like the Coens’ film, Curling takes great pleasure in revealing deep venality under the surface of a region usually represented by a kind of uncomplicated rural niceness. It also has an acid sense of humour, although Côté’s film is deadpan enough to make the Coens at their most inscrutable – The Man Who Wasn’t There, say – look like broad farce. The film may begin as a quiet portrait of off-the-grid life, but less than half an hour in the bodies start piling up – literally. Here, Côté’s plotting reminded me of that greatest of thriller authors, Patricia Highsmith. Both of them reject the standard motivations of crime thrillers – money, revenge, power – in favour of unnamable, indefinable desires that even the perpetrators would struggle to understand.

Curling was made in 2010, a point when the hottest cinephile debate was over ‘slow cinema’. The slow cinema boom of the 2000s produced some great films, as well as plenty of cynical films which abused the style to add a false sheen of intellectual seriousness to standard genre plots. Côté’s film easily skips over these tripwires. Curling‘s slow pace and locked-off camera angles never feel like pretension, they feel like the work of a director who has recognised that this arthouse style can be used to tell a story that chills and grips in ways that a standard Hollywood thriller can’t manage. The extras give some indication of where this sensibility comes from.

As well as an informative, useful booklet by Canadian film critics Adam Nayman and Tom McSorley, there’s one of Côté’s short films – May We Sleep Soundly – that reworks the themes of Curling into something that feels disarmingly like a found-footage horror with the murder scenes clipped out. And there is also a wonderful 25-minute interview with the director himself, who upends any expectations you may have of him after watching his austere feature by enthusing at length about the work of Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci! Curling is very, very far away from Suspiria in its style – but it does share a conviction that style is more important than plot in building suspense, as well as a resistance to pat plot resolutions. It leaves you with a head full of troubling questions and a desire to see more from this film-maker.

Thank you for reading our review of Curling (2010)

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