Visceral look at life and love

Ema (R16, 102 mins) Directed by Pablo Larrain Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett

In present day Santiago, a couple have given back their son to the government agency they adopted him from. Young Polo had behavioural issues on the day they met him – and the home that Ema and husband Gaston had created for him hasn’t done much to help.

Ema is many years younger than Gaston. With Polo out of their lives – although he has left a trail of destruction in his wake – Ema now wants to leave the marriage, pursue her dance career with a troupe who will welcome her and take to bed anyone of any gender she damn well likes.

Gaston, meanwhile, as the leader of his own dance company, is a fading force. ‘‘The sexual phosphorescence of youth is gone,’’ in Lawrence Durrell’s gorgeous words – but the anger and the intelligence that once made him so attractive to Ema is still there.

Ema is Pablo Larrain’s first film since the startlingly good Jackie in 2016. This film, like his portrait of the grieving widow of the assassinated United States president, is a picture of a woman pushing hard against the walls she has allowed others to build around her.

But unlike Larrain’s imagined Jacqueline Kennedy, Ema is enthralled by the thought of what might be on the other side. Her only concern is how easily combustible everything she is leaving behind might be.

Ema is a film about sexuality, repression, rebellion and grief. It is a messy, open-ended and layered partial excavation of a life in progress.

There are more questions than answers – and probably no answers that will not have changed before another few years have gone by.

There is a raw strength in Ema, occupying as she does a space in which she has all the strength that responsibility has given her but is now free to direct that power in any direction she chooses.

She is a fine line between triumph and self-delusion, freedom and destruction, and Ema – the film and the character – is determined to dance it until she drops.

With a pair of bracingly good central performances – from Larrain regular Gael Garcia Bernal and the literally incendiary Mariana Di Girolamo – and a shift behind the camera from veteran Sergio Armstrong (No) that should have won him a couple of awards at least, Ema is a vivid, visceral, adult and mostly bloody good way to spend a couple of hours.