The Silence Of Lorna Review

Lorna (Dobroshi) is an Albanian woman living in Belgium where she makes ends meet by working in a dry cleaner's shop while dreaming of opening a snack bar with her boyfriend. Lorna has turned to crime to finance her dreams, and when the film opens she is living with Claudy (Renier), a hopeless drug addict who was paid to marry her so she could gain Belgian citizenship. Needy and desperate for companionship, Claudy begs Lorna to help him beat his drug habit, unaware that the next stage of the plan requires he be murdered and his death covered up as an overdose. Lorna will then be able to marry a rich Russian who needs Belgian citizenship and who in turn will enable Lorna to launch her business.

Arta Dobroshi is brilliant as Lorna, her slender figure perfectly expressing the hard but vulnerable character prepared to go to extreme lengths to achieve her ambitions, yet who still hopes she can avert Claudy's death. Arguing bravely with the gangster who set the scheme up, she reasons that surely a divorce would be enough to end the marriage, and when he grudgingly agrees she sets about falsifying the cuts and bruises that will let her get a quick separation.

The scenes of her harming herself are genuinely unpleasant to watch, especially after Claudy's steadfast refusal to raise his hand to her but it's not just in moments of extreme drama that Dobroshi impresses. Laying in bed, struggling to sleep while Claudy bangs around in the next room, Lorna's breathing is played loud on the soundtrack, her anger and frustration palpable as she struggles to balance the many demands placed on her.

Jérémie Renier is also captivating but his performance as a suffering addict is too big in places, especially during his scenes of cold turkey. Crawling around on the floor and clawing at Lorna's legs, his physicality doesn't ring true and it's difficult to get past the implausibility of a performance that looks more like a theatre workshop exercise than a polished character.

It's unusual to have such a complaint about a Dardenne brothers film, since their back catalogue boasts such brilliant examples of people driven to extraordinary lengths by the drudgery of their everyday lives. But the brothers, who won the award for Best Screenplay at the Cannes International Film Festival in 2008, and were nominated for the Palme d'Or, seem to be aiming for something different here, something more experimental and difficult to pin down. Much has been made of the fact that this is the first film they have shot primarily in Liege rather than in their childhood home town Seraing, and the move to the bigger city coincides with a different approach.

In the past we have been invited to understand and empathise with the characters in their films, but in The Silence Of Lorna the heroine's inner thoughts and motivations become gradually more opaque and confusing, until by the end we're left feeling that we don't know quite who she is.