Nécrose

In his debut feature Nécrose, Lebanese filmmaker François Yazbeck presents a piercing, highly personal portrait of his homeland, particularly the city of Beirut. A melancholy essay film that employs elements of visceral horror, Nécrose grafts the Christian creation myth onto his poetic approach to urban space, producing an intense, idiosyncratic artistic response to the tragedies of the world.

Beirut in Yazbeck’s film is less a real place than a metaphysical stage that plays host to a cosmic psychodrama. The calamities that the city has experienced through the years has rendered it, in the filmmaker’s eyes, an abandoned outpost teetering on the brink of abyss. The camera drifts through dilapidated buildings and desolate ruins bathed in harsh light, investing them with an otherworldly aura and a peculiarly spiritual charge.

Waking up in this anti-Eden are a man and a woman, the last of their kind, enacting what the film calls “the other side of the story of the Genesis”. Perched on the precipice of doom, they contemplate an eternal night, fighting the desire to return to permanent sleep. Interweaving their plaintive voiceover with scientific footage and a primal soundscape, Nécrose forges a haunting, dream-like city elegy.

– Srikanth Srinivasan