Now on DVD: White Material

Last week I wrote a blog about inadvertently distracting things in films. White Material has one of these – Christophe(r) Lambert's face. It is part encased in a surprising agelessness and, perhaps more worryingly, looking like it's about to fall off.

No matter, Isabelle Huppert acts her socks off in an act of desperate compensation in Claire Denis's handsome post-colonial existential horror movie. At least, that's what I think this is. We begin with a helicopter encircling Huppet's wandering French farm-owner, complete with a men shouting down from the chopper, advising her to abandon the African country she is living and working in. Yet something makes her stay. But we're never sure what. Things don't tend to get any less ominous in a film which is a procession of almost-events, from naked tatooed men with gammy feet through to children with machetes.

Consequently, there's very little get a grip on, let alone care about. Denis's evasion of a plot line and backstory is almost as self-conscious as some of the free-falling hand held camera action. And it's incredibly humourless, joyless artifice too.

That said, Huppert is as great as usual. She's got a rare ability to portray a character's inner life all through her eyes. A steely gaze with some terrible trauma bubbling underneath, it's textbook Huppert but it's nevertheless compelling to watch.

And I've no doubt that Claire Denis has something significant to say about colonialism and racism in modern Africa. But in a film which holds its cards very close to its chest thoughout, I just got the impression the oblique and the mysterious was far more important to her than the truth. And that's troubling.