Home

Swiss director Ursula Meier chose wisely for her feature debut, Home. Most important, she conceived a simple plot and gathered a team of screenwriters to fill out the tale of a family of five isolated beside an unfinished motorway in rural France. Second, she recruited veteran film actors (Isabelle The Piano Player Huppert and Olivier The Son Gourmet) to portray the parents. Two teenage actresses and a boy completed the household. Crucially, for the good look of her movie, Meier employed the skills of experienced cinematographer Agnes Godard.

What happens, the scenario wondered, to the family when the motorway opens, after ten years of delayed readiness? They'd crossed it every day to reach their only access road, mail box and garbage pick-up point. The boy had cycled on the empty highway, the eldest girl sunbathed beside it. Close to the back of their simple five-room house a high wall ensured that they could only look one way in their world, at the highway, not at the farm fields behind.

The road opens, inevitable noise and air pollution arrive, privacy is lost, going to school and work needs usage of a drainage tunnel. The traffic volume increases; jams create huge audiences beside the highway railings. The already fragile nerves of the insomniac mother crack, the father's repression intensifies, the second daughter becomes a masked health freak. A rural setting has become a horror movie environment.

But the horror evaporates through plot devices that creak almost comically. An audience can accept that the mother' psyche cannot cope with relocation. It can imagine that traffic noises and vibrations trigger clinical phobias, but its belief is stretched to breaking point when the parents decide to cinder-block all the doors and windows of their house. Within, they slip into squalor and sickness. The eldest daughter had fled earlier. She returns in a friend's car, looks at the bricked-up house, assumes her family too had abandoned the house and drives off.

We have to assume that the telephone line expired but the electricity supply didn't. We must believe that no work colleagues, distant farmers or schoolfriends had asked questions. Okay, for the sake of a gloomy horror story. But Ms Meier abruptly challenges her audience to accept the possibility of the frail mother's burst of hammer-wielding self-redemption and family release.

The bad choices for her movie's ending turned a potentially fascinating fiction into a silly fable. Huppert's tears are worth watching, but they're not reasons enough to see this vehicle for them.