French Cinema: Ecoute le Temps (Fissures) by Alante Kavaite (2006)

I guess there is a school of storytelling in which one refrains from over-explaining things, and where much of the action is shown, not told.  Also sometimes the action lies in a somewhat sinister magical world which like buried chemical waste, is hinted at but never really explained.  

Charlotte is a sound engineer who is not especially on good terms with her mother, who lives in the countryside and lives as kind of a card-reader and clairvoyant, separated from her husband, Charlotte's father and as such has access to many of the shadowy goings on in the small community where she lives.   

On a visit home to her mother hits a deer and kills it, and this upsets her.  It is raining.   A short time later the mother is murdered and we see the police questioning Charlotte and the various suspects.   Gradually it comes out that the mother has a lot of liaisons and connections to the community and more than a few suspects left behind as her possible murderers.

There is the old woman and her son, who isn't quite all there who live nearby.  There is the young organic farmer and environmental activist.  There is the mayor and his accomplices who are secretly dumping toxic chemicals on her mother's land and the bearded man with spider tattoos on his arms who is his henchman.  You watch and wonder how any of this adds up.

  

In the midst of this, Charlotte makes a supernatural discovery for herself, and is able to somehow piece together the past through stringing twine through the living room and somehow recording with her rather sophistocated equipment sounds from the past, some of them going years in the past and some of them leading up to the moments of her mother's murder. 

   After she is done it begins to look a little like a complicated ballistics investigation crime scene, and of course it was a crime scene.   One does not ever learn exactly how her methods prove anything but eventually she solves the crime.

I found it an entertaining movie.  It leaves one a little mystified, but then, life is like that, and we see much more than we ever understand.