Critics reviews

The violence is shockingly graphic, yet the narrative is characteristically vague. Is it an AIDS allegory? A Cronenbergian fable about how little we understand our own bodies? Or just a reflection of whatever nightmares Denis was having at the time? As usual for the director, Denis makes you feel vivid sensations before you understand what the film means. The associative editing, the moody cityscapes, and the evocative Tindersticks score combine to create a memorable sensory assault.

Denis boils the psyche down to an enigmatic stew via slow-spilling quiet orchestras of seductive moving images, often with minimal dialogue. We are left to patiently ingest a ripe reduction of what you will surely recognize as human: sexual frustration, guilt, loneliness, lust, primal yearning… This is not a psychological thriller, nor a horror film. This is radical entrancing poetic intoxication.

Claire Denis's icy style, which favors sensualism and intimacy, is a perfect match for the horror genre... film is tragic, dark and haunting, the brutality of the violence resonating because Denis so poetically emphasizes the beauty and delicacy of life elsewhere.

This cinematic message of attraction, love-making, and violence encompassing the same primal instincts is not new ground for horror films, but matched with Shane's biological curiosity and Agnès Godard's slow, almost penetrating camera, it allows Denis further push her brooding power struggles. As an extended metaphor for the the sort of power struggle inherent in relationships, Trouble Every Day works with a unique complexity.

A woman necks passionately with a man in a car. On a plane, a husband kisses the forearm of his wife. A disfigured body is found in a field. In the opening minutes of Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day (2001), we are offered the three things that make life worth living: sex, love and death. This is nothing new, but leave it to Denis to make the conventional challenging.

Like Vendredi soir, Trouble Every Day isn't just about sex,it's specifically about the thrilling license of anonymous sex—here cannibalism fills in for just about any perversion that you could think of. This isn't science fiction. The compartmentalizing that Coré and Shane are forced to engage in, suggesting the incompatibility of sex and tender, intimate love, goes on all over the world, every day.

As in many of Denis's movies, plot and narrative cohesion are subordinate to mood and texture, sight and sound. (She co-scripted Trouble Every Day with her frequent writing partner, Jean-Pol Fargeau.) Working with her usual cinematographer, the redoubtable Agnès Godard, Denis plunges us immediately into an atmosphere engorged with desire and dread.

Gallo and Dalle are sublimely tragic figures; the scene in which Shane stalks around Notre Dame like Frankenstein unleashed is a pitch-perfect encapsulation of the way the film plays with and deepens movie-monster archetypes. Yet it's June who ends up as the movie's brokenhearted soul, so loved that she can never be lusted after and—in what is perhaps Trouble Every Day's most terrifying reveal—all too aware of that fact.

Denis expounds on the notion of sex-as-violence with an unnerving clarity that appears to explain why acts of theoretical love and brutality assume such disconcertingly similar outward appearances... Theoretically, sex involves a search for communion, intimacy, whereas violence is often an expression of dominance, and Denis shows that intimacy and dominance are similarly impossible concepts to realize with any degree of permanency, if we're to be truthful with ourselves.

Quibbles aside, Trouble Every Day feels in retrospect like a necessary step for Denis: the cathartic purge that would then allow her to indulge in Friday Night's vision of sex as a delicate, momentary attunement of sensibilities, interests, and desires. It's the kind of public self-exorcism a director can only get away with once in a career. And even at its most overdetermined, it still reflects its maker's signature love for intractable contrasts and unresolved ambiguities.

Sexual cannibalism sounds so unknowable and incomprehensible, and the film 's carefully paced and controlled rhythm creates a situation where we wonder if and when and how we will see it. We do, and part of the film's clarity of vision is how the director leads us beyond what we think we want to see or can see.

Modern vampire flicks tend to be schlock-horror affairs served up as easily digestible entertainment (even Let the Right One In falls comfortably into both coming-of-age and love-story categories). But, bringing thoughtful seriousness to bear on the genre, Denis simply does as she usually does—seeks out fleeting resonances in freeform—and this animates Trouble Every Day with an unnerving frisson.