Film

The line between heartbreak and derangement proves porous in Antonio Campos’ (Afterschool) wildly polarizing second feature. After a painful breakup with his longtime girlfriend, a recent college grad (Brady Corbet in a breakthrough performance) decides to move to Paris to lick his wounds. Before long, he’s worming his way into the life of a prostitute in an attempt to blunt his debilitating loneliness. Campos’ bold layering of sound and image burrows deep into the psyche of this inscrutable protagonist, whose emotional unraveling in the City of Lights invokes empathy and revulsion in equal measure—often in the same instant.