This measured, dread-filled family drama from Belgian writer/director Joachim Lafosse deals with the most difficult of subjects. 

Daniel Auteuil as high-profile lawyer François Schaar in Joachim Lafosse’s film A Silence

The film begins in a car. We are travelling with Astrid Schaar (Emmanuelle Devos) as she drives through the city streets. Captured in the rearview mirror, her eyes betray the tension she feels, her face a deep weariness. She pulls up outside a building – a police station, where she’s informed that her teenaged son Raphaël (Matthieu Galoux) has been charged with attempted murder. Of whom and why is revealed next in a lengthy flashback.

The film is set in the French city of Metz. Astrid’s husband François Schaar (Daniel Auteuil) is a high-profile lawyer prosecuting a paedophile network. The case has the nation gripped and, it would appear, some in the establishment are unnerved. Dark forces are working against him, François suggests, as he prepares to take part in a public demonstration to commemorate victims and grant them a kind of visibility. 

Meanwhile, journalists, paparazzi and TV camera crews are parked outside the Schaar’s home 24/7, pushing the envelope of the...