Looking Back at Polytechnique, Denis Villeneuve’s Breakout Film

These days, Denis Villeneuve has established himself as a reliable force for cinematic excellence, but at the time he released Polytechnique, he was relatively unknown. I’ve noticed that Denis Villeneuve’s pre-Prisoners films are not talked about to anywhere near the same degree as his post-Prisoners films, so I thought it would be interesting to shine a light on one of his earlier projects.

A trigger warning may be necessary at this point as Polytechnique is a filmic telling of the true story of the 1989 Montreal Massacre which saw a misogynist entering an engineering school and targeting female students. This is a heavy, uncompromising film.

Polytechnique was not Denis Villeneuve’s first film, it was his third, but it was his first film that he felt he could stand behind and be unabashedly proud of after the hampered quality of his debut feature, August 32nd on Earth, and the financial failure of his second feature-film, Maelstrom. Villeneuve took a nearly decade-long hiatus before returning to the director’s chair. His return saw his directorial style refined and precise, a scaled-back iteration of the masterful presentation that would follow in each of his subsequent films.

Polytechnique was budgeted at six million dollars, a half-million less than his subsequent film, Incendies…