AllMovie

Writer/director Delphine Gleize's acclaimed debut feature, Carnage, is a well-made, thoughtful, and superbly acted multi-tiered drama that doesn't quite add up to the epiphany it seems to be straining for. But it's consistently compelling. Gleize is a precise and clever filmmaker. She gets tremendous tension out of a simple shot of a little girl's eyes as she watches a bullfight on television, transfixed. The cast is uniformly excellent, bringing out depths in the characters that aren't present in the dialogue and plot. Raphaëlle Molinier, the aforementioned little girl, is wondrous as the spookily perceptive Winnie, and Clovis Cornillac is also noteworthy as a suicidal man whose impulse to follow the trail of his obsessions could lead him to the peace he seeks. There's a lot going on in the film, and it's all interesting, but it often borders on contrivance. A tragic turn at the end of the film is clumsily foreshadowed at the beginning. Gleize and her cast have created rich characters, and the director (aided by the terrific widescreen cinematography of Crystel Fournier), effectively sets the mood and maintains the film's tricky mordant tone, evident in one child's comic mangling of language to describe the mangling of a toreador, and another's mistaking a bull's eyes for playthings. Carnage doesn't exactly hit the bull's-eye itself, but these virtues keep the film afloat despite problems with the needlessly complex plotting.