Canadian, Sniper

Michel Kandinsky’s intimate psychological drama Canadian, Sniper puts the audience into a pensive waiting game whilst the central character undergoes a tumultuous reintegration after returning home from serving. 

François Arnaud plays the unnamed Sniper, a stoic sort who spends most of the first thirty minutes of the movie farming his father’s land in silence. This soundless space then gets peppered with short encounters with locals, such as a gun shop, a potential love interest, and the local sheriff (Lothaire Bluteau), the latter of whom provides some much-needed context for our central character’s situation and gives the audience something to finally grapple with. 

Whilst the filmmaking is clearly, and nobly, trying to imitate or at least parallel the experience of a sniper (long periods of waiting, framing scenes with unfocused edges, intense sound design), the storytelling is structurally messy. Had the editing been more coherent, i.e., bringing the interaction with the sheriff earlier into the movie, and spacing out the scenes with other people more frequently, the audience would connect with the central character earlier, allowing the cerebral elements of the movie to feel more impactful. 

It’s a shame, because there is a great movie in here. The blurring of reality and nightmarish memory for the sniper is compellingly bleak, and the inclusion of close-up creepy crawlies suggests a primal theme of man’s inescapable violent nature that is at odds with the natural world (wonderful to hear David Attenborough a few times in the background). There are also a handful of moments where comedy gets injected (Zombie Bin Laden shooting targets being one of the best) which break up the bleakness. 

The movie intelligently explores the character’s troubled relationship with his reclusive father (Roch Castonguay), who also served in the military, and suggests that familial expectation coupled with living in a podunk small town led him down the path to a violent career. 

The tension built by Kandinsky and co is commendable, and viewers who are suckers for a slow-burn will be in their element here, but for others it wildly misses the mark (pun intended). Stories about PTSD are often challenging, and with Canadian, Sniper the pensive opening section and minimal dialogue may be at odds with viewers’ attention spans, but they do at least attempt something bold and ambitious. Much like a second-hand rifle, it just needed to be assembled in a more efficient manner.