Marc Bisaillon's film is a harrowing look at two pretty good kids who do a very bad thing. Set in wintry Quebec in a small modern community, it's a tale of manslaughter and the torments that follow it. Yves (Émile Mailhiot) and Gabriel (Pierre-Luc Lafontaine) are high-school buddies with a tendency towards mischief. This expertly calibrated film shows their hijinks growing from comical to grave; the escalation is subtle, making the point of no return they pass seem not like a shift but the furthest point on a scale.
The intimacy of a small community makes the kids' sense of guilt all the more powerful--there's a scary blurring of the line between paranoia and realistic fear, as family members and friends become involved in the aftermath of the crime. Bisaillon puts us in the kids' position of fearful ignorance, imbuing lines of dialogue with menace and then revealing them to be benign. The suspense here is generic (will they be found out‾); psychological (will they confess‾); and moral (do we want them to‾). Bisaillon pushes thriller motifs up against psychological drama to explore the tension between genre expectations and the complexities of our identification with these all-too-human characters. Crime dramas create a natural impulse toward resolution, and resolution is what these kids--and the audience--both crave and fear. This is a riveting, compassionate film, one that asks familiar questions but provides no easy answers.