The respite of togetherness offered by Claire Denis in Friday Night—admittedly the transient togetherness of a one-night stand—aesthetically pushed her cinema in the same elliptical direction as 1999’s Beau Travail, but the content was but a brief deviation from the director’s themes of familial, social, and cultural estrangement. With L’Intrus (The Intruder), Denis returns to her familiar thematic ground at the same time as she pushes the capabilities of her cinema to an even more extreme degree. The film is an attempt at a kind of cinematic purity in technique which conveys and emphasizes a film’s ideas visually rather than through chronological cause-and-effect based narrative.

A tentative narrative does exist in the work though, or at least one can be put together by its end, and the story tells of a wealthy old man named Louis (Michel Subor) who lives in a cabin on the Franco-Swiss border with his two dogs. Physically speaking, the man suffers from heart problems, arranges for a transplant, and travels to South Korea and Southeast Asia to recuperate. Spiritually speaking, the man is separated from his son, who, in the film’s mysterious way, is suggested as being either a married young Frenchman (Grégoire Colin), an unknown Tahitian offspring, or both. (It is also possible that a woman who keeps a kennel in the wilderness near Louis’ cabin may be his daughter.) The man’s heart transplant embodies an utterance at the film’s beginning about one’s greatest enemy lying in one’s own heart, and also reflects the thoughts in a half-burned letter Louis wrote to his son that confessed how much his abandonment has pained his heart. Louis has attempted to retreat into an idyllic mountain landscape amidst undistinguished boundaries of country, home, and nature, and his affectionate and co-dependent relationship with his two dogs mirrors an introverted desire to reunite with his loved ones. But the pain continues even in the wild, and rather than attempt to re-build a relationship with his splintered family the man once again flees human contact. Though Louis superficially travels East to try to buy his son’s attachment with an expensive favor, in fact the old man is merely running to yet another natural paradise in an attempt to bring himself peace rather than directly face his problems.

Though ultimately not difficult to follow, L’Intus is a mysterious, abstruse, and visually evocative revelation about the remorseful, self-serving existence of isolation, travel, and escape from reality. More sumptuously elliptical than choppily fragmented (helped as always by the suggestive editing of Nelly Quettier and the exquisite widescreen photography of Agnès Godard), Denis’ film speaks through the sympathetic freedom of the camera, capturing the majestic allure of the mountains and the exotic peace of the tropics, but just as easily evoking in those same surroundings the physical and spiritual terror of loneliness, regret, and potential retribution for past sins.

Denis again draws on the cinematic character history of actor Michel Subor to organically follow through the social implications of a person’s actions in the past. Whereas Beau Travail conjured hints of Subor’s presence in Godard’s Le Petit Soldat, this film splices in grainy, saturated clips from Paul Gégauff’s unfinished film Le Reflux, showing a young and unshaven Subor visiting the tropics for the first time as a sailor. The implication is that the man’s youthful intrusion on a place and a people he did not understand has come to haunt him, for his trip spawned a son he doesn’t know and who doesn’t know him. On Louis’ return several decades later to the same beautiful surroundings he finds the relaxed lushness empty of the contact or salvation he desires.

In The Intruder Denis blurs the designation between narrative film and a sort of impressionistic, socially conscious travelogue, teasing together themes from brief footage of a forgotten film and the urban disconnection of her mid 90s work while testing the communicative limits of visual filmmaking. If anything, it is the human body that tells the story for Denis, that bares the full marker of all that a person has seen and done. Moving from the eroticism of Nenette and Boni, through the exoticism of Beau Travail, the brutality of Trouble Every Day, and the sensuality of Friday Night, Denis’ latest film climaxes her use of the body in a complicated existence encompassing all these things and more. The caressed, painful scars from the Louis’ heart transplant seems to evoke everything that can be said about this unknown, aggrieved old man, and about this strange, beautiful film. Even as Louis arrives at the environmentally intoxicating Tahitian islands—a long sequence that lacks the fresh mysteriousness of the film’s first half, and is psychologically predictable—his chest condition expectantly relapses. Though The Intruder is not as consistent as one would like, that one can understand so much about this man’s suffering through his silent, brooding physical and spiritual relapse so far away from any sort of home or family, without being explicitly told anything about him is a triumph of filmmaking.