The French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve is best known for mainstream films like
Sicario,
Arrival, and
Blade Runner 2049, stylishly expressive in their harnessing of alienating terrains, notably deserts and plains. Their claustrophobic equivalent in
Polytechnique (2009), the eerily quiet 77-minute indie Villeneuve made before his 2010 breakthrough
Incendies, is a college campus and its environs during a blizzard – the brutalist architecture and freezing temperature redolent of the feelings of the lone shooter who matter-of-factly fires his semi-automatic rifle at women in a classroom, a photocopying room, and a refectory.
Initiated by actress and co-producer Karine Vanasse, Villeneuve’s film unflinchingly and meticulously re-creates the killings of 14 women and injuring of 10 women and four men by 25-year-old Marc Lépine at the engineering school École Polytechnique in Montreal on December 6, 1989. Though the three protagonists – the unnamed killer (Maxim Ga