‘One Year, One Night’ Review: Survivors of the Bataclan Massacre Process Their Pain in a Lengthy, Earnest Drama
variety.comGuy Lodge Film CriticIt’s been nearly seven years since the devastating November 2015 terrorist attacks on Paris that left 137 dead, and while the effects of the tragedy have been indirectly felt in a surge of French films centered on terrorism, security fears and cultural conflict, filmmakers have largely shied away from direct dramatizations of the events and their fallout.
Isaki Lacuesta shows no such hesitation in his ambitious, windingly structured “One Year, One Night,” which provides an explicit anatomy of trauma as experienced over the course of a year by a Franco-Spanish couple who survived the Bataclan nightclub massacre — itself reconstructed in claustrophobic, stomach-knotting flashbacks.
Fictional but drawn from first-hand accounts, it’s a sprawling, empathetic work that sometimes loses clarity amid its sheer weight of feeling.
Poised to be an international arthouse breakthrough for its Spanish writer-director — who has twice won the top prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival, but remains comparatively little-known outside his homeland — this robust Berlinale competition entry should attract significant distributor interest on the strength of its still-resonant subject matter, blunt emotionalism and the star pairing of Nahuel Pérez Biscayart (“BPM”) and Noémie Merlant (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”).
Read more on variety.com
