Polytechnique

Just uploaded is a film review of Denis Villeneuve’s powerful drama Polytechnique, chronicling the massacre committed by Marc Lepine in 1989 at Montreal University’s Ecole Polytechnique.

Shot in stunning black & white (God I love that format) in dual French and English versions (the latter is probably what most cities will see outside of Quebec), it’s a grim but effective little docu-drama that uses Lepine’s brutal shooting of students to dramatize rabid misogyny taken to its most loathsome extreme.

Fourteen women were murdered before the nutbar offed himself, and the anniversary of the December 1989 killings are marked each year in Canada to highlight violence against women. Polytechnique is in no way an exploitive production (that belongs to derivative fodder like Karla), and it's worth checking out in theatres in spite of the obvious grim finale we know so well.

Coming next: soundtrack reviews, and a review of Saul Rubinek’s Cruel but Necessary, as well as an interview with the director.



- MRH