Sous le Sable

Saw Sous le Sable. It was about a woman on vacation with her husband. We have a few shots of him waiting for his wife. He seems preoccupied, or perhaps he's just waiting. At any rate, they go to the beach, he rubs suntan lotion on her back, he goes for a swim, and he disappears. She calls the coast guard but they can find nothing. Unable to accept his death/suicide/abandonment she refuses to acknowledge his disappearance, pretending he's still alive. We are shown him speaking to her and lying next to her in bed. She undergoes fantastic psychic contortions to deal with her simultaneous loneliness and inability to admit that her husband is gone. She has a doomed 'affair' with another man. The film is very slow and deliberate but not chilly or boring as some think-pieces are. I think even the slowest scenes are given an emotional tension by just trying to understand what this very hurt woman is thinking. Tangential themes of age and calcification are brought up. Near the end there is a scene with her husband's mother where she suggests maybe he committed suicide. Somehow the thought that his death was deliberate comforts her. His mother counters that if he killed himself perhaps it was her fault and then follows up with her own, far crueler, theory. The ending is perfectly ambiguous and unresolved. We cannot trust our eyes (we have seen her dead husband talk to her) and cannot trust her beliefs (she responds.) We think we know the truth of this situation, but do we in the end? A fascinating movie.