Bitter sweet

The French master film-maker Jacques Audiard has never been anywhere near Hollywood plot school. His films contain gathering menace — something somewhere is going to go horribly wrong — but where the menace will come from, and who will get hurt, is anyone’s guess. In his astonishing prison drama A Prophet the threat to its greenhorn French-Arab inmate comes from all quarters until he himself evolves into the threat. There are two almost unwatchable scenes in Rust and Bone: in one a marine-park trainer of orcas wakes up in hospital to discover she has lost both legs; in another a bareknuckle street fighter has to thump a hole through the thickening ice to rescue his young son.

The one consistent through-line in his films is empathy for outsiders, cut off from the — to Audiard, uninteresting — mainstream by lack of education, or disability (his protagonist in Read My Lips was all but deaf). His deracinated drifters and inarticulate chancers nurse fantasies of something better, most overtly in The Beat That My Heart Skipped, in which a dodgy estate agent dreams of becoming a concert pianist. So it is with Dheepan, a quiet but potent addition to the canon in which, once more, a nirvana devoutly to be wished lies at the far side of a booby-trapped labyrinth.

Dheepan opens in the Tamil region of Sri Lanka, where a pyre of uniformed Tiger corpses is cremated by a defeated soldier who has managed to cheat death. The next time we see the soldier (Jesuthasan Antonythasan) he’s in civvies among hundreds of refugees seeking asylum in a safer corner of the planet. His best chance of success is as part of a family. His own having been killed, he hooks up with a woman he has never met (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) who grabs a nine-year-old orphan she doesn’t know (Claudine Vinasithamby).