Having endured the seasick extremes of Lars von Trier's and Rosetta’s handheld camera work from the front row without recourse to Dramamine, I was surprised to find myself feeling tense and nauseous in the first half-hour of this nerve-jangler before I even understood what the hell was going on. Only later did I realize that that the brothers Dardenne had me emotionally identifying with the main character's personal, ethical, and spiritual crisis before I knew it existed. While they may superficially appear the same, the camera in Rosetta was an athletic stalker, sprinting to keep up with a girl who had more important things to worry about than staying in the shot.

The Son moves beyond this faux-documentary immediacy to a truly Bressonian fixation on the non-expressive parts of the body (in this case the back of the neck, the rear corner of the cheek). Also as with Bresson, the narrative is without a single second of flab: the first frame of the first shot introduces the entire drama and the film ends the moment its eventual resolution becomes certain, if not actually resolved. But by the time Olivier Gourmet unexpectedly utters the words we had been anxiously waiting to hear for the most of the film (“The boy you killed was my son”), we realize that the film has been moving ahead of itself so quickly that they hardly even matter anymore.

What wasn’t apparent way back during its initial release in January of ’03 was how starkly The Son would stand out amongst the field of 2003 imports as one of the lone films wrestling with this Bressonian strand in contemporary cinema. Not that it should come as any surprise—La Promesse took its cue from the righteous indignation of The Devil, Probably and L’Argent, while Rosetta stands as a high-octane update of Mouchette. As the Dardennes move backwards through Bresson’s filmography, they’ve given us in The Son a protagonist as unforgettable as the country priest, and as similarly conflicted, placed within a thriller structure that builds in tension like A Man Escaped.

Working within the long shadow cast by one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived must grow tiring, but Luc and Jean-Pierre never seem to show any strain. If anything, they seem to be moving ever closer towards cinematic purity—towards an even more lethal brand of moviemaking. Cinema as a whole may be moving away from Bresson, but hopefully some will carry his lessons along into whatever form it moves to take next. Can filmmakers do better for themselves (and for us) than to heed these words:

“Rid myself of accumulated errors and untruths.” “ Get to know my resources, make sure of them. The faculty of using my resources well diminishes when their number grows.” “Master precision. Be a precision instrument myself.”

Even if some semblance of this spirit remains on in the work of only a few filmmakers like the Dardenne brothers, Claire Denis, and Bruno Dumont, they will not have been uttered for naught. The Son stands as ample proof that they need not be limiting. In fact, with the barest of tools, the Dardennes have made one of the most consuming, expansive films in years.