At the risk of sounding insensitive or flippant, there aren’t many themes art loves more than grief. Over the course of the centuries, artists in various fields have taken on the subject of losing someone, and the effects that come with realizing someone important is gone. This is most likely because most of us will experience the feeling at some point in ours and its one that is never easy. This is the starting-point of Louder Than Bombs, the gorgeous English-language debut of Joachim Trier, who constructs a profoundly moving family odyssey that looks directly at the harrowing experience of mourning, and how it can influence everyone very differently – its difficult to be unified under a particular form of grief, and as this film shows, there’s not one particular way that we are supposed to mourn, nor is there any method to resolving the feelings that come with losing someone who was once a pivotal part of our lives when they were alive. A profoundly moving, but often exceptionally difficult film to watch due to its unwavering dedication to exploring something as unavoidable as death, Trier’s work here is precise, heartfelt and complex, with the director magnificently crafting a film that looks at a difficult set of ideas without ever being abrasive or insincere.

The death of a loved one is something so many have experienced, and the process of grieving is different for everyone but is almost universally difficult in some way. We each process it in our own way, and perhaps the most jarring moment is when we start to refer to the deceased in the past-tense – there are fewer feelings more heartwrenching than realizing that someone you love is now permanently going to occupy the past, becoming the subjects of mainly memories rather than tangible moments. This is the core of Louder Than Bombs, which situates us at an interesting point in the grieving process – rather than focusing on a family that has recently lost someone, the film takes us a few years into their mourning. Isabelle Reed (Isabelle Huppert) died four years earlier. A world-renowned photographer known for her work in times of conflict, her death was a shock to the world – yet we aren’t really shown the impact she made, as the film focuses solely on the three members of her family who have to deal with her untimely passing. Her husband Gene (Gabriel Byrne) is a former actor who gave up his aspirations for a more humble life. Her oldest son, Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) is an extremely intelligent but deeply conflicted academic who is just entering into parenthood himself, and her youngest son, Conrad (Devin Druid) is a teenager who rebels against a world which he holds responsible for taking his mother away. It soon becomes clear that there was something deeper lurking beneath the Reed family, starting with the realization that an upcoming retrospective on the late Isabelle’s work will finally reveal to the world that her death was not the accident it was reported to be, but rather something far more heartbreaking.

Louder Than Bombs doesn’t focus on one idea, but rather many different concepts that are all embedded within the process of grieving. Logically, we’d assume the film was trying to be a visual manifestation of the Five Stages of Grief, a theory that has not only harboured resonance in the real world but in the artistic sphere as well. However, the film is not quite as predictable, and rather chooses something far more detailed and unexpected, which allows it to be both brilliant but also surprisingly complex, even for a film that looks at something as intimidating as death. Grief takes many forms, and the film does very well in showing that its far from a linear process – it’s one that jumps around, causing some truly impenetrable emotions that can never truly be explained properly. The film deals with its subject in a remarkably sensitive way – its biggest strength is that despite being entirely about death and the emotions that come with it, whether immediately afterwards or gradually in the years that follow, Trier avoids overt sentimentality or insincerity used as a way of creating forced emotion. Everything that makes this film so moving is entirely authentic, with Louder Than Bombs existing almost entirely to be a reassuring statement that while it may be a harrowing experience and we’d never want to genuinely believe that we will recover from the trauma, it does tend to get better, even if the pain doesn’t quite subside.

The film is essentially a character-driven piece that tells three different but interconnected stories. Thus, Louder Than Bombs is governed by a quartet of performances that are all astonishing, even if for radically different reasons. Gabriel Byrne, a character actor known for being one of the most reliable performers working today, plays the widower who has to hold his family together, all the while trying to reconcile his own grief at having lost his wife, the woman who he had dedicated his entire life to. Byrne is an actor who rarely is given roles quite as complex as this, which is disappointing because he’s clearly so brilliant when he’s afforded the opportunity to play a more complex character. He is the heart of the film, with his empathetic performance being in stark contrast to the ones of the actors playing his sons. Jesse Eisenberg and Devin Druid are equally as fascinating, even if what they’re given to do is far more difficult – Druid, in particular, captures the audience’s attention in every scene he’s on screen, playing the young man rebelling against society as a form of dealing with his anger at having lost his mother. Eisenberg, while perhaps the most expendable part of the film (he doesn’t do all that much, and his character isn’t particularly consequential to the plot), is still terrific, and manages to depart from the kind of unlikeable social outcast he tends to be typecast in. However, the soul of the film is Isabelle Huppert, who may only appear in a handful of scenes, but remains an omnipotent presence, a figure that looms over the film like a spectre, bringing comfort and solace to the characters who remember her and try to keep the memory of her alive. Huppert demonstrates remarkable vulnerability in the film – she may only appear in flashbacks, but her raw, uncompromising energy makes this just another example of why she is amongst the greatest performers to ever work in cinema.

There’s something about Louder Than Bombs that makes it far more effective than the average film on this subject – its certainly not the first to take on the idea of grief, and we’ve seen this kind of story told many times before. The areas in which this film works are a lot more subtle, and set it apart from less-successful works that tend towards melodrama. Trier is a director whose work is always resonant, even when it can be hopelessly bleak. He constantly strives to take intimidating concepts and turn them into compelling films that are so deeply human, finding a sense of unimpeachable honesty in even the most uncomfortable of subjects. In Louder Than Bombs, his aim is to explore death from the perspective of an average American family (which is quite notable, considering the patriarch is an Irishman who flirted with a career in the performing arts, and the matriarch is a French photographer mostly residing in war-torn countries as part of her work), and show how each individual processes it in their own way – the blunt honesty of the film may sometimes come across as severe, as the director seems to be vehemently against the idea of reducing something like death, as upsetting as it may be, to simple sentimentality without complexity. Dealing with loss is not an easy undertaking in any way, and the director’s intention is to never detract from the tumultuous emotions present through the process. The film is extraordinarily sincere, remaining simple without ever being reductive, which may imply that its pedestrian when in actuality, its this forthright directness that serves the film the best, as it never allows it to hide behind anything other than the truth.

Ultimately, this is the most significant area in which Louder Than Bombs succeeds – it doesn’t ever promise to be anything other than a simple but heartbreaking story of a group of people dealing with the death of someone they love. Joachim Trier endeavours to explore the roots of something that may be extremely difficult, but is essentially part of life, and something that must be dealt with. He doesn’t offer any solutions, and in focusing on a few pivotal ideas relating to grief, such as the importance of holding onto memories, and the significance of dealing with your trauma in your own way, he provides a rich, vivid tapestry of life and its many challenges, one that manages to be melancholic without resorting to hollow emotion, done merely to elicit a reaction. It’s tremendously effective filmmaking, relying less on the spectacle and more on the meaning, and the result is something that carries a great deal of emotional heft, conveying a message that may be relatively straightforward at first glance, but turns out to be a lot more complex when we realize it means something very different for everyone. Louder Than Bombs is a distinct and fascinating character study that gives us a glimpse into life and its many trials and tribulations, all of which converge into something that no one can ever truly understand, regardless of how much we try and make sense of the world around us.