Director Denis Villeneuve wastes no time setting the hook at the start of his engrossing mystery, Incendies. In the first scene, a brother and sister, college-aged twins, sit in the office of their mother Nawal’s boss, and executor of her will, not long after her death. Their mother’s will has some odd requests: she’s to be buried naked, face down, in a grave without a marker, and the twins cannot place a headstone at her resting place until they’ve completed a task: deliver two sealed letters to their father and brother in the unnamed, fictional Middle Eastern country where their mother was born (they have been raised in Quebec). The problem is, they’ve never met their father, don’t know his name, and didn’t even know that they had a brother.

It’s a powerfully engaging introduction that would probably be enough to sustain interest through the next two hours even if Villeneuve didn’t spend them spinning out an ever more surprising story. His script, based on the play by Wajdi Mouawad, shifts back and forth between the twins’ investigations — initially conducted only by Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin), because her brother Simon (Maxim Gaudette) thinks their mother’s task is pointless — and flashbacks to Nawal’s (Lubna Azabal) young adulthood. As Jeanne picks up the trail of her mother’s history, questioning villagers who seem reluctant to talk once they hear Nawal’s name, that history is revealed.

The film is beautifully structured, separated into nine sections concentrating on people or places along the path of the parallel investigation and history. Each one seems a response to a question brought up in a previous section. When Jeanne finds a clue in the fact that the only photo she has of her mother from those days was taken at Kfar Ryat prison, later, there is a chapter on Kfar Ryat. Early in one of the flashback segments, Nawal, searching for the son she put up for adoption at birth (the brother that Jeanne and Simon are seeking), tracks down a mysterious warlord called Chamseddine, who burned down the orphanage where her son had lived; when his role becomes pivotal, he gets a chapter late in the film as well.

The mystery is what draws the viewer in, but Incendies is really a film about the horrors of war. Nawal, a Christian, sees horrible violence perpetrated by her own religion against Muslims, and the other way around. In one of the film’s most harrowing scenes, she must pretend to be Muslim to board a bus, and then, when the bus is machine-gunned by Christian militants, is forced to reveal the cross she carries in order to save herself; even though it means abandoning the last survivors to their own deaths.

The war makes monsters of everyone, including Nawal and the son she’s never known. They both become unlikely assassins as the conflicts surrounding the country’s revolution heat up. Jeanne and Simon (who reluctantly joins her in the search for answers) are shocked at some of the things they find out, but Villeneuve saves the biggest commentary on how irredeemably ugly the fallout of war is for the last 20 minutes. In a climax of jaw-dropping tragedy, the final secrets are revealed. In a brilliant bit of dialogue, Simon, who finds the answers first, and finding them unspeakable, can only communicate them to his sister, a theoretical mathematician, in a beautifully simple mathematical riddle.

While events of Incendies sometimes feel too outlandish to be believable, that never becomes a liability. It’s obviously a construction, but the workmanship and carefully detailed complexity of that structure are admirable on their own. The characters may be as ruthlessly manipulated as those in a Biblical parable or a Greek tragedy, but the performances of all three primary characters give them the humanity required to feel deeply for them. Like last year’s actual Greek tragedy, Dogtooth, the film manufactures shocks that have purpose, and that resonate long after the anxious feelings the movie prompts have finally settled.

—

Incendies
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
Written by Denis Villeneuve, based on the play by Wajdi Mouawad
Starring Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette
Running time: 130 minutes
Rated R for some strong violence and language.
Opens today at E Street, Bethesda Row, and Shirlington.