Christopher Rhoten
There are multiple ways to look back on Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies. One might use it to examine how war persists and proliferates, or to trace the Canadian director’s path to blockbuster success. Some might critique the film for its political fence-sitting in order to remain allegorical, or even use it to explore the trend of Radiohead needle drops (Why do they all seem to fit so perfectly?).
This latest rewatch brought all those other angles to mind, but it mostly reminded me how much Incendies trusts its audience, and how much it asks in return. It’s the patient, intuitive way Villeneuve builds both toward and beyond the unspeakable horror hidden in the premise—through accumulation, proximity, and time spent inside another person’s reality—that gives the story its power. And what a powerful story it is.
Released in the US fifteen years ago, the film became something of a word-of-mouth phenomenon largely due to its devastating final act, and its success signaled a breakthrough into the mainstream for Villeneuve, paving the way for later movies like Sicario and Arrival. While some might consider those works more “palatable,” so to speak, they would continue his quest to interrogate what we take for granted, such as authority or communication. Incendies explores the idea that empathy cannot come from revelation alone. Even though it contains an all-timer of a twist, that moment wouldn’t land without the screenplay’s careful construction and its insistence that understanding is something earned rather than given.
Based on a play by Lebanese-Canadian writer Wajdi Mouawad, Incendies tells a recursive story about how good can lead to bad and vice versa. After their mother, Nawal (Lubna Azabal), dies of a stroke, twins Jeanne and Simon (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin and Maxim Gaudette) are summoned by a notary and longtime friend of their mother. In her will, Nawal leaves them an unusual task: deliver two sealed letters, one to the father they believed was dead and another to a brother they never knew existed. Until those letters are delivered, she refuses a proper burial. While this request may seem unusual and even cruel, there is a purpose behind it.
A reconstructive investigation follows. Through Jeanne’s journey back to her mother’s unnamed home country (reminiscent of Lebanon), the film unfolds across parallel timelines, revisiting Nawal’s life during a brutal civil war. She falls in love with a Muslim refugee, but he is murdered by her Christian family in an honor killing, and their child is sent to an orphanage after birth. Years later, amid civil war and various atrocities, Nawal searches for the child. She survives a massacre, joins the Muslim resistance, assassinates a nationalist leader, and is imprisoned and raped by a torturer known as Abou Tarek, who is also revealed as the father of Jeanne and Simon.
I did mention a twist. The final revelation—that Nawal’s lost son, Nihad, grew up to be that torturer, making him both the twins’ brother and father—is perhaps a little hard to believe, but without question as ugly and horrifying as its reputation suggests. Jeanne’s reaction upon discovering this fact, a primal expression caught between a scream and a gasp, will send a chill down any spine. But while this moment would be frightening even without context, Incendies uses this shocking twist to provoke reflection on both the weight of this act and the near-superhuman strength forgiveness might require.
Like Oldboy or The Last of Us Part II, Incendies is a story about the sins of the father, the cycle of violence, and how the past reverberates through the future. But it is also a film about perspective. Villeneuve has experimented with multiple genres throughout his filmography, but, like many directors, he revisits many of the same ideas. Motherhood is also a theme in Arrival, August 32nd on Earth, and even Blade Runner 2049, just as war bubbles beneath Sicario and Dune. Another recurring theme in his work is the power of perspective. Prisoners is a story about how violence and fear grow in the absence of faith, and how trying to be God is useless since the all-knowing part is kind of important, while Enemy asks what would happen if a man could see himself objectively.
One of the ways Incendies explores perspective is by demonstrating the inadequacy of words. Nawal could have simply left a single note telling her children the truth. Choosing not to is often brought up as a contrivance, but the reason behind it is central to the story. At the start of the film, there is a rift between the siblings. It is implied that Simon is angry at his mother, possibly because of her silence about the past, but even he is left speechless by the end. And in doing so, the siblings—and by extension, the audience—must reckon with the fact that it was simply too terrible to be expressed while she was still alive.
Another way, reminiscent of The Last of Us Part II, is the film’s attempt to show that analyzing an act intellectually is not the same as having lived it. Distance is, after all, often the best weapon for justifying the atrocities of war. Nawal/Villeneuve puts us in her shoes. She asks her children to go where she went, to see what she saw, to encounter the people and places that defined her life. The truth is retraced by the children, but the viewer sees it even more clearly. We witness these events firsthand, and we see the consequences. This is applied to both Nawal and, occasionally, her child as well.
Though centered around only a few people, Villeneuve’s tragedy has multiple layers. The film gives violence itself an almost mythic quality, framing it as something that reverberates across time and space, shaping and reshaping the lives it touches. When violence is the solution, even the best of intentions are corrupted by the necessity of being the one in power. War turns Nawal’s child into a monster, though he was born of love, while Jeanne and Simon must wrestle with the evil of their origins, though they are far removed from the time and place where it occurred.
Likewise, the symbolism of combining the victim and the perpetrator into the same person is obvious. Nihad is the product of a world where both sides believe only one is correct, and his early radicalization requires believing that any amount of suffering and pain inflicted upon the enemy is justified. His identity is imposed before agency is even developed. By focusing on this fractured family, Incendies plays with the idea that we are all brothers and sisters, and something as heinous as a civil war is comparable to a son violating his mother. In a contemporary interview, the director admitted he knew nothing about war, except the kind that occurs within a family.
And yet, despite everything, the film does not abandon the idea of a solution. To be clear, the movie’s postmodern ambiguity is not an argument for complete moral relativism. Incendies doesn’t suggest that all perspectives are equally valid, nor that violence can be excused if sufficiently contextualized. If anything, it argues the opposite: that becoming fully aware of the capacity for human evil makes life more horrifying, not less. But the film resists the idea that judgment can precede understanding, or that we should indulge our vengeful instinct for ‘an eye for an eye.’ Confronting (or reliving) the conditions that produce violence may often reveal another victim.
This is where the film’s legacy proves relevant to the present moment. In the Trump era, this type of thinking isn’t very popular, if ever it was. In the years since Incendies was released, the cultural appetite for this type of tale feels diminished. “Us and them” rhetoric has only intensified, and stories that seek to explore empathy in a similar way have been controversial. From this angle, there seems to be little room for the kind of reflection Incendies demands. But when every conflict is framed as a battle between absolute good and absolute evil, nuance is more important than ever.
Whether the ending of Incendies is hopeful or pessimistic depends on how you look at it. Nihad standing at his mother’s grave is a haunting image, because it is impossible to imagine anyone living peacefully with the knowledge he’s acquired. But I lean towards a more optimistic interpretation. The purpose of Nawal splitting her letters in two, and the purpose of having her children grasp how war affects everyone involved, is to avoid further dehumanization—even when it would be justified. The dual letters at the end of the film reclaim a sense of right and wrong: in one, Nawal expresses infinite love for her son; in the other, she expresses unflinching condemnation. Rather than pick an extreme, she does not try to resolve this contradiction. One and one make one.
When the siblings hand the letters to their father at the end of the movie, there is no anger in their eyes, nor is there an attempt at vengeance, a remarkable reaction that makes sense within the film but seems implausible out of context. The discomfort stems from an act that “breaks the thread of anger” at the expense of revenge, or perhaps, justice. Though small in scale and a fragile conclusion, this act of grace may have given the twins a sense of closure.
While few things in life are truly “fair,” the effects of violence and war do not discriminate. Retreating into the certainty of our own perspective is easier, but that blindness comes at a price. If Incendies says anything new fifteen years later, its relevancy is further proof that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Perhaps the cycle of violence can only be broken by those willing to see it in its entirety and gaze into that terrible, illuminating ray of truth.
As a mathematics professor says at one point, the search for answers requires one to “face insoluble problems that will lead to other, equally insoluble problems.” Fifteen years on, Incendies remains a haunting film that asks whether we are willing to earn the truth it may offer.
