Few directors capture the unnerving, unmoored state of being an expat as effectively as Claire Denis. Disengaged from their roots, her shiftless wanderers and opportunists are drawn to unaccustomed behaviours – obsessive, reckless, self-destructive impulses that marinade unchecked while her characters focus on the business of being an outsider in a strange land. It’s true of Chocolat, her debut film; of Beau Travail and of White Material, all of which unfold in Africa. To a certain extent, it applies to her sci-fi picture High Life. And she returns to the expat experience with her latest film, Stars at Noon, set in present-day Nicaragua and adapted from Denis Johnson’s 1986 novel.
At the grubby heart of the story is Trish (Margaret Qualley, excellent), a young American woman who arrived in the country with a press card and professional ambitions that were swiftly eroded, along with her supply of dollars. By the time we meet her, she’s in survival mode, turning tricks for black market currency and favours. When she meets Dan (Joe Alwyn), a suave Englishman who says he works for an oil company, she is initially attracted to his urbane confidence and his ready supply of dollars. But a love affair grows – an intense but circumstantial passion, embraced in the same way as alcohol, to block out the mounting threats from men with knife-like smiles and guns.
Playing out in cheap motels with sweating walls, it’s a languid mood piece rather than a thriller, but one that leaves a sense of discomfort that creeps over the skin like a heat rash.
Released on 19 June in the UK on digital platforms.
