Marie and Jean are a long-married, middle-aged couple going on holiday at their summer house by the sea.

At the beach, Marie has a nap and sunbathes while Jean goes into the water for a swim.

When Marie wakes up, Jean is gone.

Did he drown?

Did he decide to walk away from their life together?

Marie must eventually return to Paris, but she cannot stop believing that her husband is still alive. Friends think she is in denial, and do their best to coax her out of the house.

Certainly, Jean's presence is still available to Marie in their Parisian house. How can he be dead?

Francois Ozon's Under The Sand (Sous Le Sable) stars Charlotte Rampling as Marie and Bruno Cremer as the missing Jean. This is a subtle undertaking about the nature of relationships: our connections to one another, how it is impossible to know another person completely, what we take for granted, the difference between comfortable and complacent, and so on. It will appeal most to grownups.

(And if those grownups speak French, all the better. Under The Sand is in French with English subtitles, but the hopes and fears and emotional content are such that subtitles don't quite capture it. End of finicky aside.)

Ozon makes it clear from the beginning that he intends to look under the calm surface of things; before his fateful swim, Jean picks up firewood at the summer property and turns over a bit of wood to reveal the rotten underside crawling with bugs. It's all very David Lynch.

Rampling is the centre of this film and she carries the entire picture.

There are a couple of extraordinary scenes -- in bed with a new lover, for example, or the sequence when she visits her cruel and possessive mother-in-law -- that really underline how subtle her performance is.

Under The Sand is vaguely disturbing, in an emotional sense, at all times. Both before and after Jean's disappearance, denial seems to play a role in the proceedings. So does loss. Delusion is in there, too.

It would be interesting to hear Francois Ozon's general thoughts on marriage.

(This film is rated AA)

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