EVERYTHING WENT FINE ★★★★

(MA15+) 113 minutes, cinemas

One of the most powerful and scary questions a movie can ask is this: what would you do? In this haunting film by Francois Ozon, the question is served up to the evergreen French star Sophie Marceau by her father, after he has had a stroke: I need you to help me end it.

Sophie Marceau (left) and Geraldine Pailhas as sisters Emmanuele and Pascale who must decide if they will help their father Andre (Andre Dussollier) die.

Andre (Andre Dussollier) is not a good father. Emmanuelle (Marceau) admits he was awful during her childhood and remains capable of spoiling any good moment. She and her sister Pascale (Geraldine Pailhas) have bonded in adversity. Their mother (Charlotte Rampling) is deep in depression associated with her Parkinson’s disease. Most of Andre’s bad behaviour is undescribed.

He had love affairs with other men throughout their stormy marriage, but there is something still between them. She comes to his bedside, stays a minute, and says drily he doesn’t look so bad.

That’s a typical Ozon joke. I used to think he was a cold director – a man who eschews emotion, preferring to torture and humiliate his characters, a bit like the American director Alexander Payne, but I have revised my opinion of both. Their control of emotion is more like a reaction against the debasement of emotion in modern drama. They hold it back as a kind of reform – never more for Ozon than in this film, where Emmanuelle has to confront the knowledge that a father she often wished dead now wants her to get to Switzerland to make it happen.

Quite apart from the legal dangers in assisting her father to die, there is a process of grieving that begins too early. What she does not expect is there is also a kind of privilege: most of us never get time to adapt to a parent’s death, to discuss if, how and when it will happen. There is another deadpan scene where papa and the daughters pull out their phones to pick a date, at his insistence: June is not possible for Pascale, May won’t work for “Manu” (her nickname), how about March? Ozon is note-perfect in balancing his dark humour with an even darker sense of the world’s multiple cruelties.

The film is based on a memoir by Emmanuelle Bernheim, whose father asked her to do the same thing. The names are retained here. As you would expect, the performances are rock solid. Dussollier is mean and outrageously demanding as Andre, but he gives his character a searing intellectual honesty. He may be a jerk, but he knows it.

Marceau, so often contenting herself with light comedy, goes deep here, trying desperately to hold herself together as the pressures mount. I can’t offer this as a cheerful night’s entertainment, but it’s superbly made, completely engrossing and very grown-up.

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