The Police Officer's Wife

A deer writhes in agony after a road accident. A husband gets shirty when his missus refuses his advances. A young girl edges too close to a fast-running weir. It’s from such fragments that Philip Gröning (who directed the doc ‘Into Great Silence’) builds a would-be magnum opus of domestic unease. A three-hour running-time, however, means an awful lot of fragments. We very soon get the idea that all will not end well for a young mum whose happiest moments are spent pottering with her infant daughter, since the atmosphere darkens when her policeman husband returns home from work. As the camera observes the household’s routines in exhaustive detail, an undertow of ominous foreboding emerges. Yet this unyielding mood offers up little sustenance for viewers already frustrated by the thuddingly overused device of dividing the whole saga into 59 separately numbered chapters.