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Adapted from Wajdi Mouawad's 2003 play, Incendies roils with atrocities and its third act feels preposterous, yet it leaves an indelible impression, partly because Azabal, an actress of rare talents, exudes a survivor's fortress-like self-possession, and partly because Villeneuve gives sentimentality no quarter.

Still, if nothing else, Villeneuve has the courage to conceive of a scenario that’s so aggressively alienating that it’s bound to drive home its conceptually innocuous point about how, as Nawal says, “being together is all that matters.”

This is a plot for a thriller, really, and Denis Villeneuve's Oscar-nominated "Incendies" doesn't shy away from that truth. But it wants to be much more than a thriller and succeeds in demonstrating how senseless and futile it is to hate others because of their religion. Most people do not choose their religions but have them forced upon themselves by birth, and the lesson of "Incendies" is that an accident of birth is not a reason for hatred.

Those chapters, shifting from hillside villages to cities and refugee camps, from the verdant north of the country to its dusty south, give Mr. Villeneuve’s film novelistic depth and epic expansiveness. They also display his sensitive eye for landscape (the non-Canadian sections were shot in Jordan) and his discreet use of digital effects to simulate the large-scale effects of war.

But while the symbolic duality threaded throughout the story... is apt and inspired, it ultimately amounts to scaffolding for an exploration of war’s viscious ironies that never quite develops. Instead, Nawal’s travails are more in the vein of a Latin American soap opera than Greek tragedy, and Jeanne and Simon’s climactic, genuinely god-awful discovery plays like artistic sleight-of-hand rather than the profoundly tautological revelation it aspires to be.

Incendies is based on a play by Wajdi Mouawad, who fled Lebanon for France when he was 8, but you’d never guess the movie’s origins until those final scenes. Villeneuve has made it breathe onscreen, so that you feel as if you’re moving—like the twins, Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette)—through a maze, on the grimmest scavenger hunt ever.

But mostly the film’s high drama, like its dexterous handling of narrative and its expert mixture of static framings and skillful tracking shots (the opener in particular’s a stunner), seems like so much empty sensation. Perhaps it’s a question of Villaneuve’s deliberate avoidance of precise historical circumstances, but by the time the film moves into its ludicrous, if genuinely shocking, final revelation, there’s little doubt that this is one virtuoso show whose truth-will-out gambit the director is far more interested in playing for more for momentary effect than lasting understanding.

“Incendies” occasionally reveals its theatrical origins but on the whole is re-imagined through vivid cinematic sequences. One of the flashbacks in which Christian troops attack a bus filled with Muslims is one of the most powerful depictions of a wartime atrocity seen in any recent film. Villeneuve exhibits impressive control over the logistics of this ambitious production.