In this French film noir, a ship captain leaves his post to get revenge on behalf of his sister whose family has faced recent tragedies.

This film is occasionally confusing but always intriguing thanks to the directing style of Claire Denis. At first, it is difficult to distinguish who's who partly because two characters look alike. There are also times it is hard to understand the motives and actions of the main character.

Still, the intrigue seems to work especially with a plot twist followed by one of those endings that is shocking because one would not have expected the film to end at that point. This is one of the few films that gets away with this device.

"Les Salauds" is one of those slow moving thrillers where it is up to us to piece together exactly what's happening and, more importantly, what has happened to the characters to put them in the situation they are in.

We see a fair bit that's troubling, and it's not hard to put together a naked woman, bleeding from the crotch, wandering down a Paris street at night-time, and the later image of a bloody corn cob. Some of the other stuff is more opaque, notably, who each person is and why they are interacting. This is also more important to the story.

"Les Salauds" tells a tragic story of incest and sexual slavery that is robbed of some of its power by the telling. When the final revelation comes, it's not that shocking, maybe because the aforementioned sights were already so disturbing, or because we are kept in the dark about who the characters are, seemingly to set the stage for one such revelation.

There are much, much worse movies in the vein of "don't show, don't tell" - see "The Headless Woman" for an example - but "Les Salauds" is nonetheless unsatisfying in its conclusion. I felt like we didn't get enough from the characters to be surprised about them, as the movie wants us to be.