Le nid [The Nest] (2018)

(On Cable TV, September 2021) Considering the miserly budgets available to its filmmakers, French-Canadian cinema has become masterful in finding ways to produce interesting material with next to nothing. Le nid takes this to an extreme of sorts, featuring a cast of merely three people, and a small hermetic set. It starts rather ominously, as a filmmaker willingly locks himself in an empty church basement, supposedly as part of a filmmaking exercise in which his wife (outside the locked basement) will give him creative cues every day and then let him put together a film project. It’s supposed to last five days, but if you have this queasy feeling that this is going to turn ugly, you still don’t have any idea how bad it’s going to be. Day Two begins with the revelation that she had an affair, and that sets things falling apart. The five days are a mere prelude, and there are plenty of elements to suggest that there’s an ugly thing we don’t yet know underlying the entire exercise. The third act gets increasingly disconnected from reality. The ending is a disappointment in the usual psychological-thriller vein (as in: “I don’t believe in any of this”) but the ride to get there is wild even as the film makes the most out of its tiny cast and hermetic shooting location. Pierre-Luc Brillant and Isabelle Blais aren’t bad as the lead couple (they were a couple at the time of the film’s production and play characters with the same name as themselves), but it’s writer-director David Paradis who earns the biggest congratulations for pulling off a high concept. Unusually dense at 84 minutes and three characters, Le nid is not always pleasant or successful, but it’s nonetheless an achievement.