The Belgian director’s latest film stars Daniel Auteuil and Emmanuelle Devos as a couple facing up to dangerous truths about their past.  

In the films of Belgian auteur Joachim Lafosse, families tend to be torn apart from the inside, brought down by deep-seated psychological baggage (The Restless, Private Property), extremely bad behavior (Private Lessons, Keep Going) or a history of abuse (Our Children). For his latest feature, A Silence (Un silence), the writer-director has managed to pack all three factors into a single movie, focusing on a bourgeois clan that gradually unravels as past and present offenses come back to haunt them.

The “silence” of the title is something that has overshadowed the Schaar family for far too long. You can feel it in the hushed atmosphere of their tasteful urban mansion, where the high-profile criminal attorney, François (Auteuil), lives with his wife, Astrid (Devos), and their adopted teenage son, Raphael (Galoux). The three don’t seem to fraternalize much when they bump into each other, almost by accident, at odd hours of the day or night. Otherwise, everyone remains confined to their own private space.

If that situation isn’t complicated enough — François has been representing the young victims for five years already, and the trial has taken over his life — it becomes a veritable shitstorm when the lawyer’s daughter, Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), confronts Astrid about something awful that happened in their own family over 25 years ago. Lafosse withholds key information about those events for quite a while, and it’s not worth spoiling them here. But suffice it to say that, coincidentally or not — and therein lies one of the film’s key questions — François’ professional and personal lives come clashing together in a highly unpleasant way, turning his house upside-down.

The story is mainly told from Astrid’s point of view as she grapples with the fallout of the revelations, which not only involve her husband but also Raphael, an emotionally distraught high schooler who finds himself swept into the proceedings. In the film’s dense second half, the viewpoint begins to switch between mother and son, showing how they’re both forced to bear the brunt of François’ unspeakable acts and behavior. Another question Lafosse asks is: Can you pardon a loved one for past crimes, or for being in need of serious psychiatric help? Or should you just let them be punished?

Such questions seem to be a specialty of Lafosse’s, a director whose best movie to date, the 2012 Cannes prizewinner, Our Children, made the viewer somehow feel deep empathy for a woman who killed all five of her own kids. Here, however — and despite some remaining doubts that we’re left with — it’s hard to get behind François when there’s a pile of evidence stacked against him.

Lafosse has never been a very cheery director, but A Silence is probably his bleakest film to date. From the very first shot, regular DP Jean-François Hensgens frames the action tightly, only revealing part of the rain-soaked car window as Astrid drives to meet with a cop (Jeanne Cherhal) who’s been trailing François for some time. The claustrophobic viewpoint, from which we can never learn the full truth, and where it seems like the walls are forever closing in, perfectly encapsulates the Schaars’ situation.

It’s a gloomy situation indeed, which isn’t to say that a movie about child abuse and murder is supposed to be some kind of upbeat joy ride. But perhaps Lafosse lays the sauce on too thick this time, and although he again probes the moral quandaries of characters facing up to awful truths, he seems to have already reached his verdict.