An arboreal intrusion

The Intruder
Cineworld & Chelsea Cinema

"My film is simply like a boat lost in the ocean, drifting," Claire Denis has said of The Intruder. An ageing man, Louis (Michel Subor), lives alone with his dogs in a forest.

He interacts briefly with a young man (Grègoire Colin) who may or may not be his son, a dog-mad local wild-woman (Bèatrice Dalle, pictured), his pharmacist lover and an intruder, whom he brutally and efficiently murders.

Is this the intruder of the title? Or perhaps it's the old man himself: after all, he appears to have no rightful place in anyone's life and his final voyage to a Tahitian island echoes the white man's long history of intrusion into foreign paradises.

You can speculate for hours about this ultimately aimless, infuriatingly oblique movie but there's the suspicion that the real intruder is the film itself: partly because it's impossible to pigeonhole and partly because it's not terribly welcome.