Ni le ciel ni la terre (2015)
Directed by Clément Cogitore

Film Review

As if we haven't already had our fill of the unintended consequences of the neo-conservatives' so-called 'war on terror', the war in Afghanistan opens up into a whole new world of possibilities in director Clément Cogitore's seductively creepy debut feature, raising the intriguing prospect of a threat from another dimension that makes even Al-Qaeda look tame.  Enigmatically titled Ni le ciel ni la terre (which ended up as the ludicrously prosaic The Wakhan Front for its anglophonic release), Cogitore's singular film owes as much to John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) as it does to The Blair Witch Project (1999) and yet it manages to be unlike both of these films, or indeed any other film with a supernatural bent that you would care to name.  Far from being a conventional fantasy thriller (a genre that is so rare in French cinema as to be virtually non-existent), Ni le ciel ni la terre provides an eerie meditation on the metaphysical as it invites us to entertain the possibility that there might well be hidden worlds existing alongside ours - unseen, unheard worlds that contain the answers to all of the unsolved mysteries of life (such as why biros and combs keep vanishing without trace and why the best films never win Oscars).

Before taking the plunge and turning out what will probably go down as the strangest French film of 2015 (it is almost certainly the most original), Clément Cogitore served his directorial apprenticeship by making half a dozen short films whilst pursuing a career as a visual artist.  Teaming up with screenwriter Thomas Bidegain - who has co-scripted a fair number of Jacques Audiard films, including Un prophète (2009) and De rouille et d'os (2012) - Cogitore reworked some familiar concepts into an unsettlingly unfamiliar film - one which subtly evokes similar fantasy offerings - notably Paul Stanley's hauntingly unforgettable Sole Survivor (1970) - whilst being strikingly different in its tone and composition.

Avoiding the trap that has claimed many a first timer, Cogitore tacitly refuses to adhere to genre conventions.  Rather than pander to his audience's expectations and roll out a succession of easy thrills, he focuses more on the human angle, in particular how we mere mortals are affected when our certainties about the world are whittled away and a primal fear of the night begins to assert itself.  There are no set-piece grisly shocks in this film, just a growing sense of unease as Cogitore gently unwinds a chilling tale that convinces us that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than most filmmakers will have us believe.

Ni le ciel ni la terre is beautifully served by its Afghan desert setting (actually the film was shot in the Atlas mountains of Morocco, not Afghanistan - for fairly obvious reasons).  It's as bleak and desolate a location as you can imagine, and when seen through a thermal imaging camera (in some of the spooky night-time sequences) it comes to resemble an alien world, totally unrecognisable from the one we inhabit (or think we inhabit).  The tough military men - a squad of muscular French troops led by a virtually recognisable Jérémie Renier - might as well be ants, so insignificant and vulnerable do they appear in this forbidding and seemingly endless vista of sand and rock, topped with a brooding sky that lours with inscrutable menace.

Fear of attack by cut-throat jihadists, fear of injury and even fear of death itself is something that these soldiers have long grown accustomed to.  But unaccounted for disappearances is something quite different - it's an attack on our reason, a return to the terror of childhood where the world is a place of unbounded mystery and anything is possible.  There is nothing more frightening than the dark, and this is fundamentally what the film is about - man's ability, or rather inability, to cope with what he does not understand.  If you are so inclined, you might be tempted to interpret the film as an attack on the neo-con's failure to comprehend the nature of the threat confronting the West in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks.  When faced with an enemy in the dark, it is a primal instinct that causes us to lash out with everything we have - and just look where it has got us.

Typically Gallic in its leaning more towards philosophical introspection than the usual blockbuster genre chicanery, Ni le ciel ni la terre is unlikely to find favour with those expecting a John Carpenter-style romp with the supernatural.  It is a far more subtle and thoughtful film than this, and even if the plot doesn't have much in the way of substance, it is hard not to succumb to the poetry of the film's stark visuals, helped by a disconcerting blend of music that embraces the ancient and the modern.  For a first feature, it is an incredibly ambitious and daring work, and Clément Cogitore deserves credit for bringing to 2015 a French film that is both intellectually stimulating and indefinably weird.

Film Synopsis

As the deadline for the withdrawal of his troops from Afghanistan fast approaches, Captain Antarès Bonassieu is assigned with his unit to a surveillance mission in a remote valley in Wakhan on the border with Pakistan.  Despite the best efforts of Antarès and his men, controlling this supposedly quiet region proves to be beyond their capabilities.  One night, soldiers mysteriously begin disappearing in the valley.  It looks as if they have been abducted by Taliban forces, but when the Taliban admit to having lost men in the same way Bonassieu has to accept the possibility that something far more sinister is afoot...