A series of still shots reveals a succession of dilapidated places. Is it an abandoned hospital, an abandoned chapel, or both? From room to room, and with this mechanical noise that rumbles, the ambient absence generates a vague unease… However, when a young woman comes into the frame, rather than fading, this impression of terrible emptiness becomes begins to swell. Guardian or prisoner of the place, she is the protagonist of Miss Kenopsiathe radical, confusing and completely captivating new film by Denis Côté.
For the record, this feature film presented at Locarno and at the International Festival from Toronto is the Quebec filmmaker’s fifteenth. As was often the case in the past, Denis Côté offers a film of inherent opacity, but an opacity that induces fascination, and not frustration: nuance is fundamental.
But before going any further, let’s come back to the title, or finally, to this strange word that is “kenopsia”. In this case, it is a neologism straight out of the imagination of the American poet John Koenig, in his work The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
Which work is full of terms describing feelings for which no words exist, precisely. “Kenopsia” is one of them and designates this melancholy mixed with anguish that one experiences when entering a space once teeming with life, but now deserted.
Enigmatic encounters
It is precisely this atmosphere of “melancholy mixed with anguish” that Denis Côté forges through the strength of his compositions, his soundtrack, the both unusual and very anchored presence of his main actress…
It must be said that Larissa Corriveau is not alone on the track throughout. Indeed, his character will have three encounters as distinct as they are enigmatic. Are these beings of flesh and blood, or hallucinations? And is the heroine really real? Could she be a ghost, a wandering specter?
Fact, Miss Kenopsia willingly flirts, in an indirect, allusive way, with the supernatural: all these strange noises and these unexplained luminous manifestations… Curling has Directory of disappeared towns Passing by Vic + Flo saw a bearCôté has accustomed us to these anxiety-inducing notes of near-terror.
Although here, the filmmaker works in resolutely minimalist territory, as for Bestiary And Wilcox. Read: with almost no means, but with a taste for narrative risk, an imagination and a vision which not only compensates, but transcends any financial consideration. There is a form of alchemy there that cannot be explained. This is the Denis Côté mystery. I hope it never gets clarified.