Directed by Claire Denis. Starring Isabelle Huppert, Isaach De Bankole, Christophe Lambert, Nicolas Duvauchelle, William Nadylam 15A cert, limited release, 106 min

NOW 62, Claire Denis has, over the last two decades, established a formidable reputation as a film-maker of unshakable seriousness and individuality.

Inclined towards evasive, liquid photography - a glimpse of a shoulder, a snatch of an earlobe, an obscure receding shadow - she eschews clear narrative for a steady, often troubling accumulation of mood.

Sometimes, as in last year's 35 Shots of Rum, she can be playful and warm (well, warmish). More often, as with Beau Travail, she plunges us into forbidding environments with little relief from life's ordinary terrors.

Similarly to Chocolat, her first feature from 1988, White Material addresses the position of a French woman in colonial Africa. Isabelle Huppert, all reddened eyes and unruly hair, plays Maria, the owner of a remote coffee plantation.

As rebels advance across the unidentified country and the French authorities urge evacuation, Maria - making like Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time in the Westand a dozen other western heroines - elects to stubbornly remain on her land. Her workers flee. So, she hires less experienced coffee pickers.

Meanwhile, her ex-husband (Christophe Lambert) makes deals with the corrupt mayor and her slacker son (Nicolas Duvauchelle) refuses to crawl out of his bed.

Slippery and confrontational in its attitude to the white person's burden, the film is as impressively creepy and intriguingly unfathomable as the director's very best work.

Given the nature of Denis' aesthetic, you would expect White Materialto work as a poisonous antidote to Out of Africabut, though violently different in tone to Sydney Pollack's meretricious waffle, the film does offer us another character deluded about her place in the colonial settlement.

Largely raised in Africa, Claire Denis must surely see herself - or her family at least - in the character of Maria. Never at home with easy answers, the director makes her a heroine, a despot, a woolly liberal and a madwoman.

No other actor could, perhaps, carry it off but Huppert draws all those facets together into one messy, tangled, entirely believable persona.

The film that surrounds her is, however, sometimes a little overheated. In particular, the son's final descent into Conradian derangement seriously strains sense and credibility.

For all that, White Material- scored by the Tindersticks' moody Stuart Staples - plays like the work of a peculiar master at the top of her challenging game. You won't forget it.