You’ve seen this before; but today it may have a different resonance.

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 Iran, the 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.