The sun shines brightly in the French Alps. Sandra, a successful German writer, has settled into a snowy chalet with her husband Samuel and their son Daniel, who has lost his sight. When Samuel dies under mysterious circumstances, the investigators try to unravel whether his fall from a height of many metres was suicide or accident. After her husband’s autopsy, Sandra is suspected of murder. Inadvertently, the trial puts the couple’s tumultuous relationship, ambiguous personalities and multiple affairs under the microscope. “Marriage is messy,” she states from the stand.

What do you want to know? This is the question that Sandra Hüller (Toni Erdmann, 2016), the greatest actress of her generation in German cinema and theatre, asks in the first scene. This taught courtroom drama, the winner of this year’s Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, tackles the unwanted exposure of private lives, a writer-author’s loss of control over her life (but not her work), and the contradictions of relationships as unrelentingly and precisely as a clock mechanism. The French director Justine Triet has chosen incisive and ruthless ways to reveal the heroine’s life without making subjective exaggerations about her moral unsoundness. By twisting the chronology, amping up the suspense, and developing off-piste storylines unusual for the genre, the result is arguably one of the best indictments with the most controversial evidence on the big screen this century.