French Canadian Actress Geneviève Bujold is a charmer. Her husband and countryman, Writer-Director Paul Almond, is a cinemagician. Working together professionally for the first time in Isabel, they have created an eye-spinning shocker that massages the heart while icing down the spine.
The scene is a seaside village on a remote stretch of Canada's Gaspé Peninsula. Almond uses his color camera as a landscape painter might, pausing now to frame a snow-banked brook and barnyard, now a pile of upturned boat hulls rotting in the winter sun. The country store, the local garage with the inevitable Coca-Cola sign and the...