Review: Belgian crime drama ‘The Ardennes’ veers off course

Belgian filmmaker Robin Pront’s debut feature “The Ardennes” is an odd mixture of glum-chic style and emotional curiosity, a story of brotherly tensions that primarily comes off like a movie posing as a story of brotherly tensions. With elliptical brevity in the early minutes, we glean that a botched heist has sent Flemish crook Kenny (Kevin Janssens) to prison rather than his co-conspirator and sibling Dave (Jeroen Perceval).

Released after four years, hotheaded Kenny wants to restart things with girlfriend Sylvie (Veerle Baetens), but she’s sober, reformed and — unbeknownst to Kenny — pregnant with Dave’s child. Kenny’s nervous bro and jittery ex tiptoeing around that major piece of news is an effective source of churn in Pront’s movie, which he wrote with star Perceval (“Bullhead”), an appealingly sensitive presence opposite Janssens’ beady-eyed bundle of dangerous energy. But a nagging sense that Pront is more taken with simplistic menace and violence over nuanced characterization and story bears out in the final act, which veers dispiritedly into Coens-meets-Tarantino territory.

The titular forest becomes the staging ground for shallow grotesquerie, cruel recrimination and, of all things, marauding ostriches. It’s the movie that has its head in the sand, though, having started as a promising noir but devolving into distracting meanness, as if fear of making something truly tough and human were the real horror to be avoided.

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‘The Ardennes’

In Dutch and French with English subtitles

Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes

Unrated

Playing: Laemmle Royal, West Los Angeles

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