New Movies: Isabel

French Canadian Actress Geneviève Bujold is a charmer. Her husband and countryman, Writer-Director Paul Almond, is a cinemagician. Working together professionally for the first time in Isabel, they have created an eye-spinning shocker that massages the heart while icing down the spine.

The scene is a seaside village on a remote stretch of Canada’s Gaspé Peninsula. Almond uses his color camera as a landscape painter might, pausing now to frame a snow-banked brook and barnyard, now a pile of upturned boat hulls rotting in the winter sun. The country store, the local garage with the inevitable Coca-Cola sign and the railroad tracks piercing through the barren hills like a steel spine flash by in a blur of fast cuts. And always there is the distant, forlorn sound of cowbell and gull cry, wind and heaving sea.

Into this somber setting comes Isabel (Bujold), a girl passing unsteadily into womanhood. Returning to the family’s 200-year-old farmhouse for the funeral of her mother, she reluctantly stays on to tend her aged uncle (Gerard Parkes), a walking reflection of her long-gone relatives, who stare down eerily from faded photographs on the wall. With the spring thaw come the chills: the specter of her dead brother looming in the doorway, a face glowing in the darkened pantry, a bloody, headless chicken twitching in the melting snow.

The house, groaning and sighing with the weight of ages, becomes a mausoleum for her, and she drifts aimlessly from room to room, her wide brown eyes masking dark fantasies. She meets a boy, but he only adds to the uneasiness. A live ringer for her dead kin, he has this strange way of gazing at her. Is it love or a grim beckoning from the beyond? No firm answers are forthcoming, as past and present finally collide in a wild, whirling scene that ends not with a bang but a whaa?

The ending may be obscure, but there is nothing unbelievable about the rest of the picture or the performance of its star. Geneviève Bujold, who first caught the eye of moviegoers with a bit part in Alain Resnais’s La Guerre Est Finie (TIME, Feb. 3, 1967), has the kind of fragile, elfin charm and doe-eyed allure that wins without wanting to. The name is pronounced Jahn-vee-jev Boo-johld. It is a name to remember.