This is a film that seems to have divided critics; it has been slammed for pretentious craftiness and coldness and distance of the characters, as well as lauded for brilliant construction and constant pace.

A narcissistic writer is bewildered to discover on a very ordinary day that his increasingly distant wife has disappeared from home, and is appalled to find, pretty quickly, that both community and state want to pin her murder on him. But no part of her story, or his, is quite what it seems, and the violence comes from an unexpected quarter when it does come.

In fact, very little is entirely the way it first appears; stories come together in fragmentary form by means of flashbacks and reminiscences, pretty much throughout the film. I'm bound to say that, somewhat tired at the end of an absurdly busy week, I didn't spot any of the clues until they were positively thrown at me, but if you are a bit more alert than I am, you might enjoy spotting the careful drawn detail, thereby anticipating and interpreting the next twist in the tale.

It's fair to say that most of the women in the film, except for the main protagonist, are drawn pretty thinly and for the most part, very negatively - the rather silly young mother, the conniving hobo, and the cynical talkshow host - and that is the source of at least some of the humour. But in fact there is probably nobody in the film who really deserves our sympathies - everyone is deeply flawed in some way, which is a bit like real life.

It's a long film, but is kept moving along apace, and is in my view altogether very sharp, clever and entertaining.