Simon Killer

There comes a moment in this dark, pitiless, mesmerising portrait of a parasitical patriarch when, bothered by the repeated sexual advances of the rapacious creature of the title, his girlfriend, a French prostitute named Victoria, flips her lover onto his hands and knees and starts banging him from behind. “How do you like it?” she snaps.

The image is made all the more powerful by its claustrophobic framing: Simon Killer is composed, almost exclusively at times, of crotch-level shots. The technique makes one think, not of low-fallutin' sub-sets of porn, but of such great 18th-century satirists as Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope: the latter surely holds some kind of record for his many plays on the word "lap" in The Rape of the Lock .

The characters, or rather the anti-characters, add to the occasion: Victoria (Mati Diop) seems to exist as a correction to every happy hooker the movieverse has ever thrown at us; Simon, meanwhile, is the unromantic antithesis of what we’ve come to expect of an American in Paris.

And worse, maybe. There are hints of dark circumstances in Simon's recent history. A neurology grad student who has lately broken up with his long-term girlfriend ("a fucking whore", he says dismissively), Simon sends unanswered passive-aggressive emails to his old lover. His attempts to exploit Victoria bring her to harm while he, in a brilliant piece of physical performance from Brady Corbet, lopes away into the night.

Corbet’s relentless and vanity-free depiction of a misogynist never allows for a chink of light. At his most tolerable, Simon is blackly comic and grossly pathetic. Mostly, he’s a decidedly charmless man whose neediness allows him to inveigle his way into the lives of unsuspecting young women.

Director Antonio Campos, who produced Corbet in Martha Marcy May Marlene and who directed the equally intriguing Afterschool , manoeuvres his eponymous antihero around the twistier arrondissements of the French capital. Simon flinches and squirms and responds in increasingly aggressive ways as those around him realise the extent of his worthlessness. Suddenly Shame 's Brandon starts to look like Mickey Mouse.

Simon Killer is seldom an easy watch but it feels like an important snapshot of the grimmer aspects of gender relations.