A family divided

The French film Jouer avec le feu (that translates as 'playing with fire', English title The Quiet Son) deals with a phenomenon that extends beyond the boundaries of its home country. It's a terrifying exploration of the widespread, worldwide affliction of political divides cutting through families and tearing the most intimate of relationships apart.

- NAMRATA JOSHI

Based on the novel What You Need from the Night by Laurent Petitmangin, it premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in September where it won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor for the French icon Vincent Lindon.

Lindon plays a single widowed father, Pierre, bringing up two sons in Grand Est, France. As his younger one, Louis (Stefan Crepon), leaves home to go to his university in Paris, the older boy, Fus (Benjamin Voisin), gets more and more detached and cut off from the family. Seduced by and incredibly attracted to the far-right, he finds himself crossing swords with his own liberal, Leftist working-class father at the other end of the ideological spectrum. As he gets steadily unruly, obstinate and intractable, uncontainable bigotry gets unleashed and violence begins to spread like wildfire. The consequences of the radicalisation of Fus turn out unimaginably catastrophic, the stuff of horror rather than reality.