One of Isabelle Huppert’s most unforgettably distraught characters came in Claire Denis’ beautiful, starkly haunting film about a white plantation owner who stubbornly refuses to leave her business in the face of an escalating and brutal African civil war.

In an unnamed but French-speaking African country, Maria (Huppert) is a divorced woman trying to run a coffee plantation. Her feckless son Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle) spends his days in bed, her father-in-law Henri (Michel Subor) is sick, whilst her ex-husband André (Christophe Lambert) keeps telling her that she should return home to France. Civil war has broken out, the colonial whites are being blamed, and the violence it unleashes is getting closer and closer. Headstrong but self-deluding - perhaps because decades of facing down quasi-insurrectionary threats from the indigenous workforce have left her unable to distinguish this grave crisis from all the other temporary mutinies - Maria travels into town gathering workers and family as child soldiers run wild searching for a legendary black hero called The Boxer. But when one of them almost kills Manuel, he snaps, throwing himself violently into the action and Maria must use all her quickly diminishing resources if they are to survive.

A thrilling account of a hopelessly detached woman powerless to fight against the weight of her adopted country's politics and history – this is a gripping evocation of the death throes of European colonialism with a stunning performance from Huppert as a woman lost in her own mind.

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