Villeneuve garnishes his narratives with touches of the surreal: August 32, the date and title of Un 32 août sur terre, doesn’t exist in the calendar year. The vivacious irrationality of Simone’s jaunty trip through Utah’s crusty desert doesn’t exactly telegraph the seriousness of his topic; her decisions are tossed off with an insouciance incongruous with the gravity of her near-death experience. And maybe that’s the point. Villeneuve treats his landscapes with as much compassion as he does his characters, or more. The close-ups of human faces are interspersed with wide shots that show the flatness of the desert, with humans appearing as tiny dots on the horizon. At other moments, his people are giants against a burnt, skewed vanishing point that fades into the distance.

With the exception of Incendies, Villeneuve’s latest projects result from other people’s visions of his potential. The actress Karine Vanasse caused a gigantic Quebec-style media frenzy in 2006 when she announced her intention to make a film about the Polytechnique massacre. After a day of sparring with skeptical journalists, when she met with Villeneuve the next morning to offer him the film he was probably the only director in Montreal who had no clue what the meeting was about. He had been sick the previous day and had missed all the headlines.

“Denis was the only director we asked,” says the clear-eyed, twenty-five-year-old Vanasse, who defended her pet project during yet another long day of press interviews when Polytechnique was released in Quebec in February. “For a project like this, you can’t put aside the violence and the horror, but Denis has a sense of poetry — and we wanted a poem about these events, rather than a reportage. In Quebec, when you talk about December 6 it’s so easy to slip into a debate of ideas, because that’s how people are used to processing this tragedy. But Denis navigated it beautifully, with just the right dose of fact and emotion, so that it doesn’t become sentimental or sensational. The film is really focused on what happened, and nothing more than that.”

In a sense, Polytechnique fits perfectly within the continuum of Villeneuve’s movies: his protagonist, a young engineering student named Valérie (played by Vanasse), is a no-nonsense career girl who recalls Maelström’s Bibiane, or Simone from 32 août. Except that Valérie is in no way the cause of her own calamity, and of course she is, to a large extent, real. Valérie and her male counterpart, a classmate named Jean-François, are fictional characters created from an amalgam of oral testimony gathered from survivors of December 6, research that Villeneuve and Davidts gathered over a year of personal interviews. Though the main characters are fictionalized, the chilling voice-over that echoes across quiet scenes of an everyday Montreal school day is starkly real: it is the voice of the Killer (played by Maxim Gaudette), speaking the exact words Marc Lépine wrote in the letter later found on his body, in which he stated his desire to commit suicide, taking as many of the “feminists who ruined his life” as possible into death along with him.

Polytechnique is both a recreation of the events as they unfolded that afternoon, and a poetic meditation on the life- and death-giving properties of violence and fear as experienced in their purest forms. Villeneuve’s rendering is restrained to the point that it’s practically matter-of-fact, and every scene is saturated with the dreadful sense that these things really happened.

Gone are the capricious narrative hooks and bright palettes of 32 août and Maelström; Polytechnique’s grey scale offers a poetic distance, according to the director, that permitted him to show things that would otherwise be unbearable. Gone, for the most part, are the spry and drastic camera angles, as Villeneuve grapples with the moral problem of where to put his camera when shooting the figure of a man who is holding a semi-automatic rifle, so as not to give him too much power in the frame, but not to trivialize him either.

The film begins with Valérie and her roommate, Stéphanie, at home in their apartment, preparing for an arduous but normal day of school. Valérie has an interview for a fellowship in mechanical engineering; she dreams of building airplanes. Stéphanie, who is more skilled at putting outfits together, helps her friend dress up as the serious, capable woman she wishes to someday become. Together they bundle up for a cold Montreal day and emerge from the metro and into the chaotic buzz of the Polytechnique. By the end of the day, one of them will be dead, and one will be changed forever. Meanwhile, in another part of town, a blank-eyed boy starts to compose his letter.

“I realize that the very idea of making a movie about these events is problematic, but to me it also felt necessary,” says Villeneuve. “I also realize it could come off as pretentious — to make a ‘poetic’ film about something that really happened. But I approached the subject with the utmost humility. These are events that happened to us, to people of my generation in my city, and somehow in the act of retelling the story there was a lot of suffering inherent in the process, but there was a healing, too. The subject of the Polytechnique massacre, now, here, is a little bit taboo. There’s a sense that ‘it’s over’ and no one wants to talk about it or touch it. The subject of power relations between men and women in Quebec is like a raw nerve…but I do think there’s a place where cinema can help us talk about these things that haunt us. I think we have to be able to go back into the wound if we are ever to be done with it.”

In Polytechnique, there are two main protagonists, and neither one is the Killer. Besides Vanasse’s Valérie, there is also the figure of her classmate Jean-François, one of the young men in the room who are dismissed by the Killer, who tells the women to stay. Looking back into the room as he leaves, Jean-François is convulsed with panic and guilt. He runs back and forth through the school, first looking for help, and then trying desperately to save his female colleagues as they lie collapsed from wounds inflicted by the gunman. Jean-François, for whom the aftershock of that day doesn’t lead to healing and reconciliation, is Villeneuve’s stand-in for all men, the conduit through which he, and we, are called upon to bear witness.

Some critics have already reacted violently to the fact that Polytechnique does not offer any kind of cohesive explanation or summary of the causes and effects of Lépine’s actions. But for Villeneuve, the very question as to why one should make a film that reopens the old wounds is in itself an answer. In a scene from the middle part of Polytechnique when the school day is under way and classes are about to begin, Jean-François notices a print of Picasso’s Guernica, clipped to a fence, supposedly part of a poster fair at the school that day. As he stops briefly in front of the image, Villeneuve’s camera pauses with him. “That visual reference of Guernica was important to me, because it corresponds with what my film is trying to do,” says Villeneuve. “I want Polytechnique to bear the responsibility of witnessing. Guernica is Picasso’s refusal of Fascism, but he is also memorializing a massacre in a [Basque village]. And of course, looking at the painting isn’t going to console me. Picasso’s gesture is futile, but also necessary, because it allows me to explore the darkness and attempt the impossibility of consolation.”