“Death is never the end of the story. It always leaves tracks.”

Incendies follows two siblings, Jeanne and Simon Marwal, whose mother has just passed away, and her final wish for them is to go and find out more about their family heritage. She tells them that they have a father and a brother that they still have not yet met, and wants them to deliver two different envelopes to each of them. Simon debunks his mother’s final message, but Jeanne goes along with it and thus travels to the Middle East, tracking her whereabouts, to find her father and brother.

At this current moment in time, Denis Villeneuve is my favorite director of all time, and I have seen all of his other highly-acclaimed works (Prisoners, Sicario, Arrival, Blade Runner 2049, Dune, Dune: Part Two), and so I was very much excited to finally check out his number one rated film on Letterboxd. What I would say I liked and found the most intriguing about Incendies was the whole mystery in it. It’s told in a sort of nonlinear fashion, not Nolan-esque at all, but rather from two different perspectives from two different time periods. First of all, you have the daughter, who is tracking down where her mother was when she was in the Middle East, so that she can hopefully find the rest of her family, but there is also another half to the story where you get to see from the perspective of the mother up until her final days, which is both kind of where the story begins and ends.

I found both stories rather intriguing for different reasons. The daughter, Jeanne, and her whole journey were easy to invest in because, since she is the main protagonist, we kind of see through her. However, we also see from the perspective of the mother, which adds a bit of dramatic irony. While the daughter’s side of the story is a lot more of a mystery, the mother’s side definitely falls more into the drama side of things. It’s a lot more emotionally heavy and, at times, devastating, and made for the most impactful moments of the entire movie.

Speaking of emotion, Incendies sure has plenty of it. It is a very emotionally rich film that really doesn’t offer a whole lot of levity to lighten things up at all. It is very much an anti-war film, and depicts violence in a very sensible way, not in any way whatsoever glorifying it, and in fact, the exact opposite. This definitely makes it less of a kind of movie that you would really ever rewatch, but I don’t ever tend to count rewatchability as a factor in my reviews, just because some movies aren’t meant to be rewatchable (intentionally).

Just like every other Villenueve film, this one definitely has some of the best cinematography you can possibly get. It’s not as flashy as some of his bigger-budget works, because this is obviously a much more grounded and realistic film, but I would say that it compares pretty nicely to Prisoners, my second favorite movie of his, and one of only five movies (including Dune: Part Two) that I’ve ever given five stars. The visuals are very “dry,” I would say, which definitely matches the tone, which I’ll talk about later on, and the colors definitely aren’t exactly on the vibrant side, but the film still looks pretty incredible.

As far as the mixed goes, I would say the ending falls into that category, at least for me. I know the ending is pretty highly regarded by most people, and I did find it to eventually hit really hard, but I do have a problem with it: I think the way it chooses to reveal its ending is very much not the most clear and concise way to do it, and somewhat falls on the emotionally manipulative side of things. It’s not pretentious at all, but I was only half sure what it was revealing until the very end, when I finally knew for sure. When the scene that is supposed to hit the hardest comes, which is before I really knew for a fact what was happening, I was rather confused. That being said, this could very much be a me thing, and, as I said, it still emotionally impacted me. I see that aspect of the film improving on rewatch.

The main negative I have for Incendies that I would say keeps it from being great is the tone, which I mentioned earlier when I talked about the cinematography. As I said, it’s very “dry,” and this plays into the story and characters as well. Yes, it has emotional moments, but the overall story itself I found a bit on the dull side, and, while I was definitely invested, I wasn’t as invested as I wanted to be. I think this also plays into the characters, to which I didn’t really find any of them very compelling with the exception of the mother. Seeing what the mother goes through makes it impossible not to feel for her, but when it comes to her two main children, neither of them really has much of a personality. Maybe this was intentional, I don’t know, but I really only found them interesting because of the whole “seeing through their point of view” sort of thing.

Incendies definitely isn’t at the top of my list when it comes to Denis Villeneuve’s work, but I think it does deliver pretty well on the emotional side of things. I also think what it has to say about war is pretty profound, and an excellent message to have for a movie (obviously). This is one of those films I see improving for me on rewatch.