10/10
Simply put one of the best movies of the year, and an absolute crime if it doesn't get greater attention outside Canada. The story: the mother of twin twentysomethings Jeanne and Simon dies, and leaves behind a will stipulating the two deliver a letter each to their other brother and their father. The caveat being that the twins had no idea they had a brother and have never met their father.
Two journeys are told at once - Jeanne (and later with Simon)'s attempts to track down her long lost family in her mother's native country (fictional but a stand-in for Lebanon, it seems), and in flashback, the tribulations their mother went through in this same country years before.
There are plenty of twists revealed to the audience before the characters, which is a clever and disarming tactic because the wallop of an ending hits like a freight train when it's revealed to all. My only minor gripe is that director Denis Villeneuve sometimes shows a lack of faith in his audience, over-exposing things with unnecessary after-the-fact voiceovers. And the plot, while magnificently constructed, requires a certain suspension of disbelief to imagine all these events occuring the way they do.
But that doesn't take away from the enjoyment of the movie itself which is gripping, harrowing, and tragic in every sense of the word. Go see it.
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