Post Tenebras Lux

Neurotic architect Adolfo Jiménez Castro has moved his family to rural Mexico, but finds his troubled home life contrasts with the daily struggle of his peasant neighbours, in this latest drama from maverick Mexican film-maker Carlos Reygadas (Silent Light). Greeted with both critical incomprehension and the best director prize when it premiered at Cannes last year, the film has divided opinion from the outset, not least because of its provocative collage approach to storytelling, which leaps back and forth in time and space with dizzying freedom. With isolated scenes including the felling of ancient trees, raunchy goings-on in a European sex club, fanciful boyhood flashbacks and even English schoolboys playing rugby, Reygadas adamantly eschews linear narrative to offer instead a kaleidoscope of thoughts and feelings, often viewed through a distorting ripple-effect camera filter. The film does come across as an evidently sincere attempt to create a new kind of cinema, but opinion will certainly vary on whether Reygadas really does offer, as his title suggests, light after darkness.