Patric Chiha's "Domain"

Thank heavens the Voice still has Melissa Anderson: "Fearless Béatrice Dalle, who made her screen debut at age 21 as the sexed-up, self-mutilating title character in Betty Blue (1986), has, in the past decade, played a cannibal, the Queen of the Northern Hemisphere, and a fetus-snatcher. As Nadia in Patric Chiha's hypnotic first feature, Domain, Dalle might have a more cerebral profession — a mathematician who specializes in Gödel — but her capacity for destruction, both of herself and others via bottomless glasses of Vouvray, remains just as infinite."

"Viva Béatrice!" Time Out New York's Keith Uhlich: Nadia "takes her gorgeous, gay teen nephew, Pierre [Isaïe Sultan], under her broken wings…. Chiha keenly charts the duo's relationship from its beguiling early stages to its inevitable downward slope, and never in the expected ways. The moment when Pierre starts to show backbone comes not with a blowout fight but in a surreal, smoky musical number in a nightclub that's an early contender for scene of the year."

"Chiha knows when the story is wobbling off the rails of credibility and leans into the turn, embracing the narrative's full-on nuttiness," writes Movieline's Stephanie Zacharek. "The demented pleasures of Domain are slow-burning ones. As [John] Waters aptly put it in Artforum, this is a movie where the two main characters form a 'perversely close' relationship by taking walks — 'Lots of walks! So many walks you'll be left breathless by the sheer elegance of this astonishing little workout.' … Chiha also wrote the script for Domain, and while some of the dialogue comes off as pure wack-a-doodle, it's never laughable enough to throw you out of the picture. In fact, Domain is compelling precisely because of its lack of embarrassment. As Pierre, Sultan deftly walks the line between boyish innocence and erotic sophistication: He's sweet, but there's a pheromone-cloud of mystery hanging about him, too. And Dalle is just made for these loony-sexpot roles... She doesn't disappoint here: Her Nadia is voracious, an appetite walking around on two impossibly long stems."

More from L Caldoran (Cinespect), Stephen Holden (New York Times) and Eric Kohn (indieWIRE).

Domain is at New York's IFC Center through Tuesday.

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