By Federico Sierra

An immigrant tale disguised as a family drama, Incendies follows twins Jeanne (Melisa Desormeaux-Poulin) and Simon Marwan (Maxim Gaudette) in a journey to discover the mysteries of their family’s past. The movie opens when the twins are called by their mother’s lawyer to read her will, which reveals some unexpected truths about their family history. It turns out that the father they always believed had died in war is actually alive. They additionally learn about an older brother they didn’t know they had. The will tasks the twins to travel back to their mother’s home country of Lebanon and find the rest of their family to bring them together.

Based on the play by Lebanese-Canadian writer Wajdi Mouawad, the movie plays like a detective mystery as the twins are thrust into a quest to unravel the dark, unspoken realities of their mother’s story. Coming fresh from his directorial debut with Polytechnique (2009) Denis Villeneuve, who also shares a writing credit, presents this story in two parallel timelines: one which follows the twins’ journey into the Middle East to fulfill their mother’s dying wishes, and the other which focuses on Marwal (Lubna Azabal), the mother, showing her story through flashbacks as we observe the tragic life she left behind when she emigrated to Canada.

With the restrained cinematography of a documentary, Villeneuve is able to depict the true horrors of war to understand how survivors must learn to forgive the brutal memories of death and fire in order to heal and move on.

In essence, Incendies is a story about regression and understanding one’s origins as a way to make sense of their place in the world. Nawal’s will to her twin children is not one of wealth and material luxuries. Instead, it comes in the form of a mission — a fragile task they must undertake to recognize their cultural origins and how they must make peace with the intergenerational trauma left by the war.

Overall, Incendies is a slow revealing mystery that gets deeper with each scene. Villeneuve successfully weaves both timelines so that they build each other up into a grand revelation as the protagonists unravel their mother’s past. The movie’s graphic depiction of violence translates the shock the characters go through on to the audience while simultaneously illustrating the cruel reality of what it’s like to grow up somewhere consumed by war and death.

The movie received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film of 2010. It’s critical success would propel the career of Denis Villeneuve towards Hollywood territory, where he would go on to direct some of the most celebrated and influential movies of the decade: Prisoners (2013), Sicario (2015), Arrival (2016), Blade Runner 2049 (2017).

Most recently, the Hollywood Critics Association granted Villeneuve the Filmmaker of the Decade Award on January 9, 2020.