A portrait of a marriage made in hell
The astonishing, break-out critical discovery of the Venice Film Festival, where it was awarded Best Director and Best Debut Film, Xavier Legrand’s heart-stopping French drama Custody charts a family’s struggles with the fallout of divorce, and the resulting impact on the two children.
Miriam (Léa Drucker, The Blue Room) and Antoine (Denis Ménochet, The Returned) have recently separated. While she’s willing to permit their 17-year-old daughter Josephine (Mathilde Auneveux) to decide living arrangements for herself, Miriam is desperate to keep her youngest, 11-year-old Julien (Thomas Gioria), away from his father. But the magistrate rules in favour of joint-custody, and suddenly the boy is thrown directly into the middle of an escalating parental conflict, where it seems inevitable that sides must be chosen.
Superbly observed and flawlessly acted (the heartrending performances of the two children are more than worth the price of admission), Legrand's precise dissection of this family dynamic masterfully builds into a pulse-pounding thriller. Honest, yet still evoking profound sympathy for all its protagonists, CUSTODY is sure to be remembered as one of the most important and vital films of 2018.
Special Features:
- Short film by Xavier Legrand, ‘Just Before Losing Everything’ (nominated for an Academy Award and winner of the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival)
Critics Reviews for Custody
- “As in all good movies of this kind, the ordeal of the children is not skimped. They bear the brunt, and the legacy, of the anguish.” – Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor
- ""Custody" can be difficult, even wrenching to watch, but it always plays fair with the audience, and the experience, worth every minute expended, is impossible to forget." – Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
- “We've all seen these sorts of domestic bogeymen before in any number of Lifetime movies. But rarely are they presented with the matter-of-fact naturalism that Legrand brings to his Venice Silver Lion winner.” – Chris Nashawaty, Entertainment Weekly
- “Legrand operates in the raw social realist tradition of such auteurs as Maurice Pialat and the Dardenne brothers, stripping away sentimentality in favor of direct, observational filmmaking.” – Peter Debruge, Variety