The first feature from the writer-director Laura Wandel is an astonishingly powerful depiction of schoolyard bullying. Shot in close-up, Frédéric Noirhomme’s claustrophobic camerawork stays shoulder-high with its young cast, a jarring effect designed to make the most robust viewer feel small. The shallow focus amplifies the inescapable horrors faced by seven-year-old Nora (Maya Vanderbeque), who is first glimpsed clinging to her father (Karim Leklou) and brother Abel (Günter Duret) at the school gates. It’s her first day of school and she’s in need of assurance.

At first things are not so bad, even if the roughhousing scenes of breaktime look terrifying. Nora likes her sympathetic teacher (Laura Verlinden) and seems to be making friends, until the moment when she spots Abel being horribly bullied. He warns her against confiding in an adult, providing the first of many agonising dilemmas and the beginning of a cycle of violent retributions that become increasingly dangerous. Every attempt to fight back against the perpetrators is met with greater force; all efforts to flag the bullying with caregivers prove futile, if not foolhardy; cruelties and mean remarks are internalised and amplified. The playground is a place where adults, however well meaning, have no dominion. Inevitably, the only strategy to counter bullying is, well, bullying.

Purgatorial place

Playground’s original French title was Un Monde – meaning A World – and it does often feel like Nora and Abel’s school is a purgatorial place from which there can be no escape. Hell, as Jean-Paul Sartre didn’t quite have it, is other kids.

At 72 minutes, Playground falls shy of feature length, yet it atones with a sickening sense of dread and pinpoint emotional accuracy. The performances that Wandel coaxes out of her young cast are remarkable and often painful to behold.