Vincent Lindon and Juliette Binoche in Both Sides of the Blade (Curiosa Films/IFC Films)

Claire Denis’s new film opens with a beautiful montage of a train tunnel, the sun reflecting in water at the feet of two lovers—Sara (Juliette Binoche) and Jean (Titane’s Vincent Lindon)—on a Caribbean vacation, and a domestic scene in a Paris apartment, where Sara and Jean take down laundry while smiling at each other. They’re happy, and since that montage launches a Claire Denis movie, it’s an easy guess that their bliss won’t last long.

Details are revealed slowly, though we find out Sara’s former husband, François (Grégoire Colin), will become a part of their lives again. Once best friends and business partners, François and Jean have decided to undertake another business venture together, leaving Sara both troubled and brought back to life by her ex’s presence. Her and Jean’s reactions to François’ return form the narrative: Will Sara be able to understand her needs enough to communicate them to the men she’s loved before permanently harming both relationships?

It’s hard to pin down what Sara, Jean, and especially François are feeling, which creates an emotional mystery that the film seeks to underscore more than answer. The intentionally cryptic screenplay doles out information as if clarity is beside the point—we’re in the here and how with these characters. François initially seems as though he may be playing with Sara’s attraction by leading her on, but it’s Sara that might be leading on both Jean and François and not be aware of it. That ambiguity is the point.

Sara works as a national radio host, conducting interviews about serious topics, one about a refugee crisis and the other about racism. Meanwhile, Jean has a biracial son, Marcus (Issa Perica), from his previous marriage who is being raised, with difficulty, by Jean’s mother (Bulle Ogier). Marcus and Sara only share one scene, where she says hello without looking at him. These details feel like metersticks measuring Sara’s engagement with the world: She is a stepmother, a wife, and an investigative journalist, though it’s only her attraction to François and Jean that motivates or drives her. These observations feel similar to Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash, where the self-involved sexual complications of an Italian poolside holiday are underscored by two brief scenes pointing to the country’s Syrian refugee crisis.

For their parts, Binoche and Lindon are fantastic at executing their explosive arguments, large and small. Like Denis’s Let the Sunshine In (2017, co-written with the same screenwriter, Christine Angot), this is a vehicle for emotions to play out on Binoche’s face, while allowing Denis to explore what it means to survive love and live with regret. A portrait of a desperate, emotional Paris winter, Both Sides of the Blade is an interior film, physically and emotionally, beautifully shot by cinematographer Eric Gautier (who also worked on Denis’s other 2022 film, Stars at Noon). While it meanders without always feeling satisfying or purposeful, it’s a moody movie for fans of Denis’s more recent work, character studies with dense emotions to unpack.