An alternately lyrical and brutal vision of desire as pure lust, with cannibalism envisioned as the end result of tossing off one's inner humanity in favor of animal instinct. But then, isn't that what sex essentially is, in some ways? Not that Claire Denis is puritanical about sex; Trouble Every Day is framed not merely as the typical slasher-movie "sex = death" equation, but more as a blood-and-thunder struggle between thought and feeling, scientific detachment and Romantic passion. Certainly, I can't remember the last time I saw a film that featured a shot as uncanny as one here in which the camera roved along the body of a nude male soon-to-be-victim and somehow conveyed both omniscient clinical analysis and chomping-at-the-bit sexual desire at the same time. As annihilating as that desire might be in Denis's world, the film's own tantalizing/disturbing endpoint suggests that it may also be perversely cathartic as well.