Catherine Frot creates a moving, assured portrayal of a damaged woman in a film following in the coolly measured steps of I've Loved You So Long.

Frot plays a separated working mother with a young child who becomes unaccountably fascinated with the sister of one of her son's friends; as her behaviour grows increasingly erratic, it provokes first uncertainty and then hostility in the girl's mother (Sandrine Bonnaire).

The playing out of maternal traumas in unremarkable French surburbia makes for a disconcertingly direct focus on the struggle between the two women; where the narrative ends up going isn't entirely unexpected, but at least we're spared any stalk-and-slash action, which would be entirely out of kilter with what went before.