Home is where the heartbreak is

Custody is both social realism and a thriller and it’s terrific. It is smart, beautifully acted, never crass about the subject in hand (domestic abuse), and is one of those films that will have you totally gripped while you’ll also be longing for it to end, as it’s so unbearably tense. I swear my heart as good as stopped several times. It’s written and directed by Xavier Legrand, who handles both genres with supreme elegance. Or, to put it another way, it’s like a Ken Loach film that’s been hijacked by Stephen King, but seamlessly. (‘Mind if I have a go, Ken?’, ‘Be my guest, Steve’.)

This is Legrand’s second film after Just Before Losing Everything (2013), which was only 30 minutes long, but earned him an Oscar nomination. It followed Miriam (Léa Drucker), a wife fleeing from her violent and controlling husband, Antoine (Denis Ménochet). Domestic terrorism is reprised here, as are the characters, and the cast is the same, but it isn’t necessary to have seen the first film. You’d just know who to believe, unless Antoine has truly changed? Could he have? Violent men are always great manipulators and, here, Legrand uses the same mechanism to manipulate us too. Smart, like I said.

Custody, which won the Silver Lion at Venice, opens in the social realist register with Miriam and Antoine sitting across from the family law judge who will now decide on custody of Julien (Thomas Gioria), their 12-year-old son. (They also have an older daughter, but as she’s about to turn 18, she’s of legal age, so spared this ordeal.) Miriam says Antoine is a monster, in effect, but she’s timid and not that forceful. Julien has written a letter saying he wants nothing to do with his father, which the judge reads aloud.