Amanda review: A sensitive but short-sighted portrait of life after a terror attack

Director Mikhaël Hers struggles to connect his characters’ personal grief to the collective trauma of a city

Dir: Mikhaël Hers. Cast: Vincent Lacoste, Isaure Multrier, Stacy Martin, Ophélia Kolb, Marianne Basler, Jonathan Cohen. 15 cert, 107 mins.

Grief carves canyons into a person’s existence. It ruptures every sense of the familiar. In Amanda, French director Mikhaël Hers explores these pains with a gentle touch, seeking healing in the face of profound loss. When we first meet David (Vincent Lacoste), he’s enjoying the freedom of his twenties. He’s juggling a few jobs, serving as his landlord’s righthand man and occasionally trimming trees for the Paris parks department. He flirts with his new neighbour Léna (Stacy Martin). Every once in a while, he’ll drop by to help out his sister Sandrine (Ophélia Kolb), who’s raising her seven-year-old daughter Amanda (Isaure Multrier) on her own.

Life is good – and simple. When their estranged mother Alison (Greta Scacchi) suddenly reaches out, Sandrine is eager to meet her. David refuses. He can’t abide by anything that might pierce the airtight bubble he’s created for himself. But there are things that exist outside of his control. When tragedy strikes, Amanda is suddenly left without a mother. And, with an aunt (Marianne Basler) now the only other family member in the picture, David faces an inescapable fork in his path: is he ready to become Amanda’s guardian? Or is the responsibility too much for him to bear?

Hers, who co-wrote the film with Maud Ameline, carefully guides David and Amanda through their grief and towards a period of quiet reconstruction. It’s a deliberately unshowy film, concerned more with the daily hurdles than with any sweeping observations. We see David struggle to break the news to an acquaintance. In another scene, he’s struck down by a sudden panic attack at a train station. Lacoste lets the anguish squirm around inside David like a parasite – at times, he looks sick with it. Between ragged breaths, he does his best to compose himself and carry on with his day.

The film touches lightly on the November 2015 attacks on Paris. Although Hers veers away from any direct connections, he does depict the direct aftermath of a mass shooting in a city park. We’re shown a patch of green littered with bloodied bodies, the stillness interrupted only by the choked cries of survivors bent over their lost loved ones. It’s a powerful image, but Hers otherwise struggles to connect David and Amanda’s personal grief to the city’s collective trauma. The characters involved deliberately isolate themselves: David refuses to take part in a victims’ support group, while Léna, who’s injured in the attack, retreats to the countryside and is barely heard from again.

These don’t feel like choices made to offer meaningful insight into the healing process. Instead, they act as a shortcut to avoid any conversation about the wider impact of terrorism. The only time Hers dares peek above the parapet, it’s for a momentary glimpse of a woman in a hijab being racially abused in public. David, ignoring the obvious, uses it as a springboard to talk about atheism and hell. Amanda may explore loss with sensitivity and grace, but only after it’s shielded its eyes from the rest of the world.