Scholarly filmgoers may recall a movement that sprouted from Danish soil called Dogme 95. It worked to a Spartan set of rules and regs. In Dogme titles there could be no lighting and no soundtrack, no locations pretending to be other locations. Hell, there were probably no Portaloos on set and actors fixed their own herring smørrebrød. The director, in an ultimate gesture of klaxonning self-effacement, took no credit. Except that everyone knew Thomas Vinterburg shot Festen and Lars von Trier made The Idiots.
The spirit of cinema’s Mennonites lives on in Chronic, a pitiless, hatchet-faced film set somewhere sunlit in the grassy American suburbs. It is written and shot by Mexican director Michel Franco. His central figure is a middle-aged English agency nurse who cares for clients in God’s waiting room. When you first see David at work he is dousing the naked body of a woman so skeletal it takes a minute to twig that she’s not yet a stiff.
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