Touching the void | 18 February 2016

Scholarly filmgoers may recall a movement that sprouted from Danish soil called Dogme 95. It worked to a Spartan set of rules and regs. In Dogme titles there could be no lighting and no soundtrack, no locations pretending to be other locations. Hell, there were probably no Portaloos on set and actors fixed their own herring smørrebrød. The director, in an ultimate gesture of klaxonning self-effacement, took no credit. Except that everyone knew Thomas Vinterburg shot Festen and Lars von Trier made The Idiots.

The spirit of cinema’s Mennonites lives on in Chronic, a pitiless, hatchet-faced film set somewhere sunlit in the grassy American suburbs. It is written and shot by Mexican director Michel Franco. His central figure is a middle-aged English agency nurse who cares for clients in God’s waiting room. When you first see David at work he is dousing the naked body of a woman so skeletal it takes a minute to twig that she’s not yet a stiff. His second client is an elderly stroke victim who communicates in furious unconsonanted groans. His last is an abandoned grandmother suffering from terminal cancer.

So not a lot of chuckles (apart from when a boy in a wheelchair tells David to ‘fuck off’). Nor is there much information to work with. The film’s austerity is not merely aesthetic: the camera that never pans, the audio track of domestic noises that abjures the frippery of music. The script is doled out in parsimonious fragments and shards of muttered dialogue. ‘We don’t have to talk,’ says one client, which may as well be Chronic’s strapline. You enter scenes after they’ve begun and leave them before they’ve ended. Alternatively, when nothing is happening, the cut never comes, so you hang about Staring At Emptiness.