Polytechnique

Polytechnique (2009) is a Denis Villeneuve drama you can watch online on iFILM. Shot in black and white, it recounts what happened one winter day at a Montreal engineering school, when an armed man walked into a classroom and ordered the women to one side of the room.

Villeneuve films it quietly, with almost no score: the camera drifts down empty corridors, then holds still beside the people caught inside. The story rests on two students — Valérie (Karine Vanasse) and her classmate Jean-François (Sébastien Huberdeau), who afterward cannot carry the weight of that day. The gunman is barely shown; the director refuses to turn him into someone worth remembering.

The film was built from the accounts of survivors and gave Quebec a way to speak about a wound it had kept silent for twenty years. The cold grey palette makes the winter light feel almost painfully sharp. It's an early piece from Villeneuve, long before his Hollywood features. Stream Polytechnique (2009) online on iFILM.