The Missing Half

Provincial bourgeois couple Claire and Pierre are expecting twins, but elect to abort one foetus - a decision which so overwhelms Pierre he withdraws from the relationship and in effect 'adopts' Laurent, a disabled young man who is losing his sight. The French title ('The Other') is more appropriate for this strange, testing film, influenced, at a guess, by the spare spiritual rigour of the Dardenne brothers (albeit with odd absurdist touches more in line with Mariage's previous The Carriers Are Waiting). It's a film of pointed asymmetries, but in the end its redemptive poetics are only half convincing.