Philippe Grandrieux's 1999 film Sombre is an appropriately titled work of bleak and nihilistic cinema that was obviously intended to provoke more than it was intended to entertain. Certainly a film that will divide audiences, it does feature some impressive moments but ultimately is a little too empty for its own good.

The storyline itself is a fairly simple one. Jean (Marc Barbé) is a creepy serial killer who operates in rural areas of the French countryside where he spends his spare time finding prostitutes to kill. One night he meets runs across a stranded motorist. He stops to pick her up, finds out her name is Claire (Elina Lowensohn), and soon enough she's going with him, along for the ride, as he starts killing again. Their relationship grows and as such becomes considerably more complicated as the film progresses, until finally their lives become freakishly symbiotic and co-dependant.

What's interesting about Sombre is how Grandrieux's script works the lives of the two leads together in a disturbing and rather unconventional manner. Compare the two of them to the darkly comic Mickey and Mallory Knox from Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers and here you see a much more serious and extremely grim take on the Bonnie And Clyde style love story. Claire and Jean obviously have feelings for one another - the only time Jean even really shows any emotion is when he finds out she's been with another man - but they're both so closed off from the rest of the world and so completely inhuman in many ways that it's easy to think otherwise. The primary flaw in the film is that neither character is given much of a back-story. While sometimes ambiguity can help make a film more mysterious, here it simply feels like a cop out in the sense that we're watching two people who are obviously quite complex without being given any idea of what made them this way in the first place.

Performance wise, things are solid across the board. Jean and Claire are really the only two characters that matter in the picture so obviously a lot of the film's merit needs to fall on the shoulders of Barbé and Lowensohm, both of whom handle the material admirably.

Visually the film is quite impressive. The cinematography is very effective in capturing the story's inherent darkness and requisite nastiness in some fairly unflinching detail and it works - it feels seedy. At the same time, there are some quieter, more melancholy moments in the movie that are actually some of the strongest parts of the picture. Grandrieux is clever enough to bookend his picture this way and it gives the opening and closing scenes the impact they require. Adding to the atmosphere is an extremely unnerving soundtrack from Alan Vega (formerly of Suicide) that can bounce back and forth between minimalist and multilayered in some interesting ways.

Video:

Koch presents Sombre in a 1.66.1 widescreen transfer that has not been enhanced for anamorphic sets. This being a very, very dark film from a visual standpoint, the transfer is quite dark and there are times where some of the fine detail gets lost in the murkiness and the shadows. Lighter scenes fair quite well, and they don't look bad at all but things are definitely not as strong in the transfer department as they could have been. That being said, even the murkier scenes are watchable, they just lack the clarity that maybe they should have had.