Unspoken is a character study of few words – or better, of a lot of unspoken words – about the inability to communicate of the parents of a daughter who disappeared without trace five years before.
The mother, played by Emmanuelle Devos, who is nearly bursting out of her seams from pent-up emotion, regularly sees a girl in the underground who looks a little like her daughter. And the father (played by Bruno Todeschini), who is wasting away from self-torment, receives mysterious telephone calls that may point towards the girl. Until the father/husband disappears without trace too. From that day on, the mother/wife is all on her own twice over, which may seem less lonely in some ways.
Fien Troch made her feature début in 2005 with the prize-winning Someone Else’s Happiness. Her second feature is about coming to terms with a loss that can’t really be coped with, because there is no certainty about the nature of the loss. It’s not about unravelling the fate of the daughter, but the question of what the loss does to those left behind, who after a time are confronted with people in their surroundings who expect them to have come to terms with the loss. This hidden tension cuts through the soul like a scalpel, not lastly through the delightful play with depth of focus by cameraman Frank Van den Eeden. (GT)
Film details
- Country of production
- Belgium
- Year
- 2008
- Festival edition
- IFFR 2009
- Length
- 97'
- Medium/Format
- 35mm
