It’s not a Michael Haneke film, but it’ll do till one gets here. Mexican writer-director Michel Franco gives Tim Roth his best role in aeons as a touchy-feely care nurse whose no-questions-asked compassion is made to feel eerily suspect. Yes, this palliative prince goes all out to make sure his patients experience a comfortable transition into death, but why is he always on that treadmill, what’s with all the Facebook stalking and why is he taking on all those extra shifts?
Franco, sadly, methodically answers all these questions, turning a cool, anthropological study of what it means to take another person’s life into your own hands, into a clumsy screed on how unremittingly awful and ugly existence is. Shot with the uncomfortable precision of an amateur science experiment, it’s little more than arty scaremongering for hypochondriacs, which is a crying shame, because Roth is stellar as the lead.
