Trouble Every Day

Trouble Every Day (2001) opens with Tindersticks’ swooning, doomy song of the same name enveloping the image of two figures—neither of whom are seen again—making out in the back seat of a car, their hands and mouths drifting toward what we imagine to be an inaugural sexual encounter. This arresting overture, bathed in body heat and inevitability, alerts us to the film’s dominant theme of consummation, which will be taken to carnal, lurid extremes. A ferociously sensual filmmaker, Claire Denis uses genre to wonder what it means to desire flesh and fluid with animal abandon. Trouble Every Day’s debt to David Cronenberg is overt in its embrace of body horror, but the film is also deeply Cronenbergian in its willingness to go hard with regard to turning a thought experiment into sumptuous, gruesome drama.

Working in tandem with longtime collaborators co-scenarist Jean-Pol Fargeau and cinematographer Agnès Godard, Denis approaches Trouble Every Day’s storytelling in a mode that’s characteristically elliptical and exposition-avoidant, yet the core elements of the story itself are familiar from canonical post-Darwin horrors like Island of Lost Souls and lesser-known variants like Dr. Renault’s Secret: a young American doctor (Vincent Gallo) and his new wife (Tricia Vessey) travel to France, ostensibly for their honeymoon, though it seems the doctor’s real motives are to track down an experimental neuroscientist (Alex Descas) who’s been keeping a low profile as a family physician so as to draw attention away from his beguiling wife (Béatrice Dalle), a semi-feral creature in the habit of luring men with the promise of sex, only to rip their bodies apart in the midst of copulation. While in thrall, Dalle’s character, Coré, feeds like a cheerful canine, kissing and cuddling her prey as she tears away their tissue and bathes in their arterial spray. Only after these ecstatic feasts subside, only after the neuroscientist buries the evidence and sponge-bathes her, does she seem aware of her brutality, calmly declaring that she would like to die.

Tremendous quantities of blood and viscera are on painterly display in Trouble Every Day, though the gore isn’t quite as difficult to witness as certain scenes of sexual assault and murder in which seduction, consent, and unholy terror are all but impossible to parse. These horrors are troubled by the ongoing conflation of violence and eros, and by sequences of lyrical beauty, such as the one that alternates between Coré descending a staircase in a blood-smeared dress and the doctor played by Gallo watching her from below, retreating into shadow while his wide eyes fix haplessly on his object of desire and repulsion. Considered part of the New French Extremity, Trouble Every Day remains divisive for Denis stans and horror fans alike, though Tindersticks’ Fangoria Chainsaw Award–nominated score, along with Dalle’s supremely go-for-broke performance, something akin to Isabelle Adjani’s legendary freak-out in Possession, are unforgettable. 🩸