Acclaimed French director Claire Denis’ often opaque films combine the personal with the political. In the aptly titled contemporary noir film Bastards, Denis again plums the messy and troubling depths of her characters’ psyches in order to explore capitalism, using a real Paris sex-ring scandal as inspiration for her relentlessly dark critique of corrupt men in power.

With a talent for leaving her keeping her audience off-balance, Denis’ darkly textured film unfolds slowly, with a series of often chronologically jumbled vignettes taking time to coalesce. As Tindersticks’ sensually techno score creates a seductive but ominous soundscape, Denis’ disconnected opening scenes hints at tragedy that has befallen, and tragedy still to come.

Denis’ Friday Night leading man Vincent Lindon plays a brooding ship’s captain, returning home to help his sister (Julie Bataille), whose husband has committed suicide, and daughter has been hospitalised after a vicious sexual assault. Convinced that wealthy business man Eduard Laporte (Michel Subro, terrifying and ghoulish) is involved, she convinces Vincent to help her, drawing him into an increasingly murky world of corruption.

Using the tropes of a traditional noir policier, the director’s characters are easily recognisable; the stoic lead, the adulterous femme fatale, the enigmatic villain. Plot-wise too, the genre film sticks to pot-boiler convention, taking obvious cues from Chinatown and even giving a twisted nod to William Faulkner’s Sanctuary. Denis’ achievement thus lies in the grim beauty of her atmosphere; her frank and sensual shooting of bodies, her elegantly enigmatic relationships, and the mounting sense of dread. Her horrific climax acts as a burning denouncement of the sexual and financial exploitation committed by those in power, one not easily forgotten.