Nobody’s Violence

The Canadian auteur Denis Côté is one of the great loners of contemporary cinema. His films enter places of solitude where violence and despair can erupt at any moment. His new film “Nobody’s Violence”, shown in competition at Locarno and honoured with a special mention for actor Xavier Bergeron, takes this obsession this time to the outermost limit: to death.

The enigmatic Mira travels through Canada with her dog. She rings the doorbells of strangers, pulls on black gloves and hands them lethal poison. A mysterious organisation arranges these encounters, which Côté stages with frightening sobriety. But the angel of death Mira reaches her professional limits when she meets a young man who stirs feelings in her that she has never known. Deep in the Canadian woods she will have to rethink her professional ethos, which turns Côté’s film into a meditation on the question: what happens to a person whose everyday life consists of helping others to die?

In tactile, shimmering 16mm images, the Canadian makes Mira’s world appear like a sombre memory. It is no coincidence that Côté wrote the screenplay after a life-threatening diagnosis. The result is an eccentric thriller that becomes a peculiar study of freedom in the face of death. A film full of trapdoors that shows why Denis Côté remains so unmistakable in world cinema.