72 min | NR | February 11, 2022 | Film Movement
A seven-year-old girl starts elementary school and discovers her older brother is being bullied. She tries to help him. She learns that the schoolyard punishes loyalty as fast as it punishes weakness.
Nora is a young girl entering primary school for the first time. Her older brother Abel is already there, and she quickly sees that the other boys torment him. The film stays at her eye level for its entire length, so the audience knows only what a child knows. Laura Wandel builds the story around the impossible math of childhood loyalty. Nora wants to protect her brother and wants to belong, and the playground forces her to choose between the two.
Maya Vanderbeque plays Nora with a watchfulness that never reads as performance. She registers fear, shame, and calculation in small shifts of expression while the adults around her miss all of it. Günter Duret plays Abel as a boy learning to hide his injuries because exposure only invites more cruelty. The dynamic between the siblings inverts and reinverts as each becomes the one who needs saving. The young actors carry scenes that depend entirely on what they refuse to say out loud.
Wandel writes and directs her first feature with a single formal rule that governs everything. The camera holds tight on the children and keeps every adult cropped, blurred, or out of frame entirely. Teachers become voices and waists and hands that arrive too late and leave too soon. The handheld camera follows Nora through hallways and across the yard at a height that turns ordinary spaces into a maze of threats. The sound design fills the gaps the frame leaves out, so off-screen shouts and slammed doors carry the violence the lens declines to show.
This is a film about the private economy of children, where survival means reading the social order faster than the adults who claim to run it. Wandel refuses the easy comfort of a teacher who notices or a rule that holds. The cruelty is systemic and the kindness is fragile, and the film grants no resolution that a child could not earn. It is a tight and unsparing piece of work that treats a playground as the serious world it actually is.