Critics reviews

Director Denis Côté orchestrates their scenes with deadpan humor and a musical sense of choreography that resembles Wes Anderson, but without the cuteness factor. Côté's world has no mercy but still yields a breathtaking beauty.

With this feature, Côté breaks new ground in terms of his own oeuvre, and has made one of the more challenging films about love and desire... By the time Vic + Flo comes to its brutal end (given the sense of doom that infuses the film, this is no surprise, but the devil is in the horrific details), Côté has created a world that's equal parts tender love and sheer terror. It's not a comfortable world, but it's also one that isn't easily forgotten, regardless of geographic location.

...Vic + Flo Saw a Bear feels like a cross between an overly calculated version of [Claire Denis'] enigmatic, sensual work and a watered-down take on Bruno Dumont's... Vic + Flo is designed to crescendo to its WTF-inspiring final two shots, the first of which throws in a Lynchian impossibility for the hell of it and the last of which culminates on a self-reflexive script line ("It's over") to rival There Will Be Blood's "I'm finished.

...There's a deeper tension at play here than the one between what the audience might expect and what they're actually given: the narrative feels simultaneously arbitrary and meticulously mapped out, stably unstable, calculated and de facto improvised—it's as if the filmmaker has managed to internalize, on a structural level, what we witness the characters slowly relearning, which is that even the most considered plans have a way of going completely awry.

The movie's arresting opener — a woman standing next to two boys on a bench, one of whom is playing the trumpet, badly — is exemplary of [Côté's] deliberate, oblique, evocative approach. You don't know who these people are to one another, why the boys are dressed like scouts, why one is playing an instrument and why this woman with the crumpled face feels the need to critique his playing.

[Côté's] work has a mischievous edge; characters aren't introduced but simply appear, seemingly coaxed from thin air, their significance unclear. He excels in subverting one's expectations—the gritty cinematography, for instance, dampens the idyllic, arboreal setting, and woven into the action are subtle strands of paranoia, passion, and malice. As Côté dives deeper into these moods, the film turns aggressive and impressionistic, moving from low-key drama to tragicomic fairy tale.

With its rigorous visual style (strongly frontal medium-wide shots; long takes; mildly miraculous tracking shots; a palette consisting of blown-out whites and ice-cold blues) and its often Sphinx-like cast, Vic + Flo makes for a strange and affecting experience, albeit one that's more admirable than likable. Even so, Côté and his collaborators have crafted an astounding movie that doesn't care about being adored but that certainly demands to be dealt with.

...One of Vic + Flo Saw a Bear's great strengths lies in revealing just enough of the couple's flickering former contentment to give its gradual dissolution some heft. Côté's most-inspired narrative jump comes in the introduction of Flo, who arrives at the house after Vic has set herself up there (and of whom the narrative itself reveals nothing at first).

[Its] commitment to tonal muddling seems to stem from an understandable/commendable urge to destroy genre boundaries, but "Vic + Flo" eventually outfoxes itself, its self-conscious oddity never suggesting some kind of intuitive but difficult to articulate momentum... Most of the film is a smart, funny movie about a couple facing internal relationship problems and external obstacles, well worth a look.

Vic + Flo Saw a Bear is a more mysterious and withholding film, while retaining [Côté's] off-kilter humor... In his droll, dreamy long takes Côté establishes that [Victoria and Florence's] love is in the past but not behind them, a curse they can't rid themselves of, as dangerous as the psychotic gangster Jackie and her mute henchmen who've got a thing for breaking Flo's limbs. It's a love story and a death story which turn out to be the same thing.

THE WOMEN-BEHIND-BARS GENRE, dating at least as far back as the Barbara Stanwyck–starringLadies They Talk About (1933) through Orange Is the New Black, has been a steadfast source of sapphic entanglements, whether presented implicitly or explicitly, luridly or not. Denis Côté's wry, elliptical, but compassionate Vic + Flo Saw a Bear adds to this illustrious tradition by imagining the prisons his same-sex, ex-con lovers find themselves in—some of their own making—after they've been sprung.

Set entirely in quiet rural area where deceptively kind neighbors roam freely across properties and treelines spell disaster, this story of long-gestating revenge is one of those seamless gut-punches that drifts calmly by with the wind.