Marc Dumont is a good husband, a father, and a serious executive. His peaceful life satisfies him; he has always been content with it. With his wife, Hélène, and their two children—twins—they live in Saint-Nazaire; on weekends, they head to the island of Noirmoutier. On the peninsula, they go to the market, gather shellfish; Hélène reads, the children play on the beach. A daily life marked by comfort and harmony. But everything changes when Paul Delacroix joins the company where Marc works. Everything changes, because the two men become friends. At the heart of a hypnotic closed-door drama rooted on the Île de Noirmoutier, at once fascinating and threatening, Stéphanie Chaillou builds genuine narrative tension, a climate of “uncanny strangeness” that draws us in, as her main character lets himself be inexorably enthralled. She offers us a story of mutual fascination, attachment and fragility; a story of complex friendship between two men, each subject to the underlying forces that drive them—urges, past, dreams, unspoken aspirations.
