The film-geek party line from Cannes has it that with Le Silence de Lorna, Belgium’s acclaimed directing duo Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have finally faltered. The film is about the same thing—illegal immigrants in the E.U. and their dire straits—as their previous effort, La Promesse (1996). It subjects its titular heroine to a now-rote Dardennian dilemma: whether or not to privilege one’s own life over that of another, more desperate and more significantly encumbering one.

Yet Lorna is also unique. Lorna herself, played with unshowy determination by Arta Dobroshi, does almost inexplicable things, shifting so radically at key moments as to appear unconvincing—sexually comforting her junkie husband (Jérémie Rénier), for instance, whom she is plainly exploiting for citizenship. The main problem here is Lorna’s dependence on noir-ish conceits: the Dardennes’ trademark vérité style is so mundane as to make all narrative jolts appear wrong, untenable. Indeed, Lorna herself, one of the Dardennes’ most charismatic latter-day saints, cannot be accorded much psychological or spiritual resonance by an apparatus that is largely indifferent to her (compare Lorna to Hans-Christian Schmid’s superior Requiem, a similarly detached film that is also, at heart, formally in line with its heroine’s fanaticism). Thank goodness, then, for Lorna’s script—the empathy of which goes beyond cold, Flaubertian parable, and may actually signal an important evolution in the Dardennes’ oeuvre, rather than an ungainly step back.—David Balzer

Le Silence de Lorna festival show times:
• September 7, 6:00 p.m., Scotiabank Theatre 1
• September 10, 9:45 a.m., Scotiabank Theatre 1