French director Bruno Dumont (Hors Satan), better known for his weighty tales of spiritual suffering makes an unexpected foray into deadpan comedy with this improbable, screwball and slapstick police procedural focusing on a bizarre set of crimes taking place on the outskirts of a small town in Northern France.

When the lifeless body of a cow is airlifted by helicopter from the depths of an abandoned WWII-era bunker it’s because inside the animal itself lurks an even grislier discovery: the dismembered body parts of a woman, minus only her head. So it falls to two men — the good Lt. Carpentier (Philippe Jore) and his boss, Cpt. Van der Weyden (Bernard Pruvost) (sporting some of the most expressive eyebrows this side of Groucho Marx) to make sense of this and all manner of other strange goings on. Indeed, the Captain’s perplexing investigative methods seem to fall somewhere between the Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Clouseau school of solving criminality. But the local cops aren’t the only ones on the case. With the summer vacation just underway, events serve as a welcome distraction for the young and mischief-minded Quinquin (Alane Delhaye), who whiles away his days playing pranks on his hapless parents and grandparents. There isn’t much for a kid to do in this seaside no-wheres-ville, so when Quinquin isn’t hurling lit fireworks into the house, he and his band of similarly bored pals peddle their bikes around town, watching from afar as the police investigation unfolds. Little by little, a sinister jigsaw puzzle begins to form but when more body parts start turning up inside yet more farm animals, the town’s bucolic surface is itself revealed to be but a thin veil disguising a hotbed of racism and xenophobia - ailments that extend it seems to even its youngest residents.

A police investigation like few others that shows off the comedic if not necessarily the lighter side of its director, adds up in the end to an alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) hilarious and unsettling whole.

• There will be a Cinébabies screening of Li'l Quinquin on Mon 13 July at 11:00.
• The screening of Li'l Quinquin on Tue 14 July is part of our Cinébites deal: Get 30% off any main dish in the Café/Bar with a valid cinema ticket.

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