School of Scares

REVIEWED - INNOCENCE: Lucile Hadzihalilovic has hitherto been best known for collaborations with her partner Gasper Noé - she edited the brilliantly horrible Seul Contre Tous - and there are some superficial reminders of that talented director in her impressive feature debut.

Here again we hear ambient noise being amplified for sinister effect. Hadzihalilovic encourages Benoît Debie, Noé's director of photography on Irréversible, to once more fold murkily beautiful hues into the most uncomfortable images. But Hadzihalilovic's film is a less frenzied affair than either of her squeeze's two pictures.

Set in a girl's boarding school hidden within the sort of wood where witches dwell, Innocence makes use of dusky mottled light, bold fairytale imagery and dubiously transgressive depictions of pre-pubescent sexuality to tell a story that is alternately intriguingly baffling and clumsily allegorical. Even when the director's own script (adapted from a story by Franz Wedekind) falters - the analogy drawn between the metamorphosis of an insect and the coming of puberty is particularly gauche - the images are so striking and the atmosphere so overpoweringly creepy that one's attention doesn't lag.

Prompting memories of Suspiria, Picnic at Hanging Rock and even the TV series The Prisoner, Innocence begins with young Iris (Zoé Auclair) being delivered to the school in a coffin. The institution is governed by an intricate series of rules and traditions: the girls wear ribbons, coloured to denote seniority; one older student leaves the dormitory each night for some mysterious purpose; dances are performed for an unseen audience. Any attempts at escape invariably end in disaster _ most impressively when one young girl drowns picturesquely in a rowing boat.

When the film is functioning as a work of surrealism it ticks along very nicely. The problem lies not in obscurity, but in its moments of lucidity. The notion of depicting impending female sexuality as something dark and potentially fearsome has already been toyed with in works as contrasting as The Exorcist and the stories of Angela Carter.

Hadzihalilovic has nothing much new to say here, but the beauty of her presentation suggests she has a talent worth nurturing.