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For all that, I walked away from After Love feeling like I knew precious little about these characters. Lafosse gets so many critical things right about this decaying relationship that, at first, I did not wonder too much about the lack of specificity or detail about them as people. But later, it gnawed at me. We see early on that Boris is in debt to some rough, gangstery types. Who exactly is this guy?

The Belgian director Joachim Lafosse's "After Love" is an irritating movie about irritating people... Marie, a narrowly conceived character nevertheless played well by Bérénice Bejo, is uptight and withholding; Boris, by turns warmly bearish and broadly truculent as played by Cédric Kahn, is controlling and manipulative, not to mention aggressively self-pitying.

The movie too often puts too much trust in dialogue, as Marie and Boris's predicament is sometimes perfectly conveyed by the actors' facial expressions and body language... It's precisely when the body is called to do the talking, to do the mending, even if just for one song, that ambivalence is made clear. Like an Elena Ferrante character, Marie wants to leave, but Marie wants to stay. She loves the children, but she abhors them. She wants to go forward and she wants to go backward.

This new disturbing-indoor-psychological drama sees Lafosse, yet again, choose one angle of attack (here, money) and break it down to reveal human baseness. This technique of dissection is not without its moments of pertinence or affect, but it is, mostly, wearyingly formulaic.

Here's some good news right off the bat: the girls make it out of the film unscathed. In fact, no one gets assaulted, or murdered, or unduly traumatized in any other way. In this regard, After Love is an unusually moderate film by Lafosse's standards. While it ultimately lacks some of the vigor of his previous work, it does allow you to leave the cinema without feeling ill, which is also nice.

It's one of the more bourgeois topics to explore in a domestic drama, but the division of a shared life and its accrued property after a marriage breakup is a theme which Joachim Lafosse clearly finds rich with cinematic potential.

A portrait of amorous breakdown that's at times virtuously directed, using a single ground floor apartment – albeit a fairly large and tastefully decorated one – to chronicle a French couple's bitter unraveling over the course of several months. It's like Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage condensed into a shorter timeframe and only a handful of rooms, although its depiction of a crumbling relationship can be just as complex, if not quite as emotionally resonant during its final stages.