A Note on Other Interpretations

I enjoyed this film, and have submitted a synopsis and a review (though I suppose it's more of a 'reading' of the film). I was going to add this note to my review, but it made the submission too long. So here it is, for what it's worth, for anyone interested in how one ambiguous scene might lead viewers to misinterpret.

Some correspondents here have seen suggestions that the father is in fact a serial killer. I don’t think the film overall supports this. His parenting has been well-intentioned, but faulty. What Nicolas imagines is sometimes pretty gruesome, because of what he has been exposed to. One of his escapes is reading fairy tales, and he tells Patrick about his favourite, in which “The Little Mermaid” is given “soft skin” where scales had been— a much more pleasant thing to imagine than the prosthetic limbs his father sells. There is nothing necessarily ominous about the police looking for a car like the father’s, the timing of the father’s business trip, his failure to return with Nicolas’s bag, nor the difficulty contacting him when he is “on the road.” But those things, along with Hodkann’s story to the police, would surely make him a “person of interest” in the disappearance of René, the local boy. He’s going to have to deal with the consequences of his son’s anxieties now.

One shot I found puzzling— because it did have an ominous feel. To distract the students from morbid thoughts after they learn of the death of René, the teachers have a dance for the students. But Nicolas cannot stop worrying about his father. The father’s car is seen racing down the road, and there is a close-up of a spinning drive shaft under the car, which suggests relentless driving, perhaps even desperate driving. It’s easy to think Nicolas is making a connection between his father’s travels and the discovery of Renés body far away, “in another region.” I think, though, that it is merely another instance of Nicolas worrying needlessly about things when he should be enjoying life.