आलोचक समीक्षाएं

Rigorously structured and glacially paced, this sophomore feature from Andrea Pallaoro (after his 2015 family tragedy, “Medeas”) is a minimalist portrait of brutal isolation and extreme emotional anguish.

It is a haunting portrait of emotional undeadness.

The veteran English actress, 72, a onetime femme fatale who has matured into a peerless performer, gives a first-rate lesson in the art of acting, as a woman crumbling under duress after her husband is incarcerated. And yet the Belgian-set drama, by Italian director Andrea Pallaoro, could also be called self-indulgent, plodding and minimalist, in a big way.

This is an impressively rigorous exercise, in which the director’s sober formalism finds a kindred spirit in his leading lady’s studied, secretive restraint.

Rampling, a Modigliani of long-limbed litheness with a face built for sorrow, inhabits the role and the visual compositions so deeply that the character resonates long after the film has ended.

There’s nothing else to watch or care about in the entire film anyway. Once again, a great actress is on her own.

Charlotte Rampling gives an emotionally rigorous display of bruising internalization, without an ounce of vanity, in the title role of Hannah. But although the lead performance commands admiration, the overall impact of this unrelentingly dour account of a woman struggling to carry on with her life after her husband's imprisonment is dulled by its distancing approach.

Andrea Pallaoro’s frigid portrait of a woman in crisis is more a calculated exercise in formalism than an achievement in storytelling. His well-composed images of loneliness are cerebrally satisfying but lack emotional heft.

There is a real seed of dramatic possibility in Hannah, but Pallaoro smothers it beneath the lacquer of the film’s fastidiously mannered minimalism.