A dark and beautifully realized thriller, Inexorable knows how to play on restraint to better accomplish its apocalypse scheme. Through this tale of sickly love and the shadows of the past, Du Welz signs his best work since Calvary, his masterpiece.
Inexorable: a sticky and intense feature film
In Adoration, his previous film, Fabrice Du Welz defined the inexorable through the character of Gloria, played by Fantine Harduin: "It's something that has to happen, something fatal". With this line, the Belgian filmmaker already seemed to announce the contours of his next work, his next obsession. Two years later, Inexorable arrives in the dark rooms. In this collapsological thriller, an author (Benoît Poelvoorde) tries, in vain, to repeat the feat of his first novel, Inexorable, as he moves into the house of his father-in-law, a renowned former publisher. The pillars of this family, the Bellmers, are weakened by the arrival of Gloria, a taciturn girl whose designs seem obscure, even malicious. 
Fabrice Du Welz's cinema does not necessarily please everyone, that's a certainty. Naive and grandiloquent, it is a frontal aesthetic of emotion. For the director, everything is shown with a scale of magnitude, from the most banal love scene in Hallelujah, to the cerebral-spiritual Way of the Cross in Calvary, the sum work of his filmography.
With a keen eye
Constantly on the edge between unhealthy embarrassment and euphoric explosion, the 7thart Du Welz way never ceases to question itself, to evolve within works that, if they can be uneven (Vinyan, Adoration), even truncated (Colt 45, who has accumulated production problems), keep a real personality that gives them a rather singular cachet. And to place each new film of the Flemish director as an event. As such, Inexorable is no exception to the rule, and much more. It is nothing less than the best work of the filmmaker since Calvary. What stands out from the outset, in this poisonous thriller, is its atmosphere. Du Welz looks towards two references: on the one hand, the American brain drama, with Mortal Sin as a reference (whose director John M. Stahl is quoted in the acknowledgements) and Bergman's "bourgeoisploitation" to Chabrol. 
Through this boiling and controlled mix, Fabrice Du Welz disseminates all the markers of his cinema. From his obsession with certain names and surnames (Paul, Bellmer, Gloria), the duality of colors in the photography (here the golden confronts the green, then the garish red and the turquoise blue in the finale), but also the scenes of voyeurism, where intruders enter the cocoon of other protagonists. Never gratuitous, these sequences, marked by shots on the iris, also mirroring the filmmaker's gaze, are here transfigured by a skilful staging, based on many symbolic shots. From the light of a lamp as a metaphor for a liberating psychoanalysis for the character of Poelvoorde or the arrangement of a table plan to mark bourgeois domination: any emotion or message passes through the frame. And distill an atmosphere between lyrical and pure anguish.
Agent of chaos
Now seasoned behind the camera and shooting experiences, Fabrice Du Welz seems in total control of his vision and will convince, with Inexorable, even the most resistant to his generous and figurative cinema. His use of 16mm film, used wonderfully by his cinematographer Manu Dacosse (with whom he has been working since Alleluia), magnifies this austere and mesmerizing atmosphere. Inexorable takes here a new definition, more radical than in Adoration: "ruthless". And this feeling of fatality is embodied by a new iteration of the surname Gloria, in the guise of the incandescent Alba Gaïa Bellugi. First cousin of the witch of Salem and a succubus that would not have denied Paul Verhoeven, it is a troubled character, herald, then agent of chaos within a wavering nuclear family. This character is the great success of the film, the one that represents the anti-patriarchal and anti-elite charge, in a deconstruction of the aristocratic circle, showing us his dapper if putrid side. 
Even if everything is not completed in Inexorable where, for a few sequences, Fabrice Du Welz seems to give in to flashy style effects and a naivety too grandiloquent not to disturb, the feature film is perhaps the most held of its author. Perhaps not the most original either, between the archetypal characters and the expected structure (the reversals being a little predictable towards the finale), but one of the most accessible of the filmmaker. This will allow, perhaps, to find him a wider audience and hope for a nice success in theaters. Inexorable is an experience that marks beyond its projection. Its poisonous atmosphere, through the self-destruction of a fragile social microcosm, taunts the mind as much as the globes, thanks to a stunning image. Fabrice Du Welz returns to cinemas with one of his best films, where actors shine at the top. Relentless, unmissable… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNE12khERcc
