An absent father returns to his adult son's life with painful results in the intimate and absorbing new French drama, How I Killed My Father, a film that sets up a difficult premise - an unrepentant, dead-beat father re-approaching his troubled adult son without remorse. As co-written and directed by Anne Fontaine, it's an effective chamber piece about an unsentimental and difficult family reunion that yields painful truths about the nature of parental absence and its toll on adult children.

Some time in the recent past, we first meet middle-aged Maurice (Michel Bouchet) as a profoundly unhappy man in therapy, questioning his existence and the emptiness of "life in general."

In the present day, his forty-year-old son Jean-Luc (the excellent Charles Berling) is a successful gerontologist living in Versailles with a beautiful wife, Isa (Natacha Regnier, displaying her signature radiance and fire). They live a picture-perfect life on the surface, but below the facade, there's resentment, distance and melancholy. One day, Maurice suddenly shows up and their lives are thrown into disorder.

Maurice is a reserved, observant man who abandoned his wife and two sons decades ago to guiltlessly begin a new life practicing medicine in Africa. His impromptu return opens old wounds with Jean-Luc. When he begins to observe that his own son behaves in a cold, detached manner, he begins to grow closer to Isa, upsetting Jean-Luc's world and calling into question a past - and present - that must be reconciled.

Jean-Luc has created a compartmentalized life that is "safe" for him, in that he has a successful practice, beautiful wife, no commitment to any children of his own, and a lovely mistress.

Maurice seems a more complex man. At one startling scene late in the film, he tells Jean-Luc, "I'm not obliged to love you." And yet he most probably does, as evidenced in a powerful scene where he begs his son not to repeat his own mistakes.

We're never quite sure why Maurice left his family, or where his wife ended up - the film disposes of a mother figure. But in the film's provocative opening therapy scene, he explains his anxiety about being a father: "I have a son. He's two now. When he turns twenty, I'll be an old man. I'll have no hold over him, no prestige in his eyes. I look on him as a stranger. Almost a threat." Later in the film, we will learn that he was a man who felt his life just did not fit him any more - he "no longer recognized himself" in his life, and therefore just became someone different.

He spends the majority of the film behaving as if his exit had little repercussions on his own life, though in the film's late scenes, he's become tragically aware of the emotional casualties he's caused in his own son. And as much as we're not exactly sure why Maurice left his family, we're also not certain as to why he has suddenly returned. He watches, waits, evaluates and then moves forward again.

This father and son are strangers. The nature of the relationship is one of apathy tinged with resentment. At yet, there are times when you can sense a glimmer of something more emerge between them - not love, but rather, a small sense of respect or appreciation. These moments are few and quickly diffused with anger.

How I Killed My Father is in no way a sensitive story of family reunification, of a distant father and son coming together on common ground and of familial healing. Old wounds are opened, yet they're not mended.

As Maurice and Isa grow closer and secrets are discovered to exist between Jean-Luc and Isa, Maurice and Jean-Luc begin to navigate their way toward some sort of - not reconciliation - but understanding of things that seem almost unknowable.

But even as adult children, when we are with our parents on holidays or other special occasions, we are kids again. And is it ever possible to understand their adult motivations or actions they took when we were small? Are we ever able, as adults, to reconcile the image of parent with the image of the parent as an individual person, with hopes and disappointments, exclusive of us?

How I Killed My Father is a haunting, sobering film. There's some sort of closure at the conclusion, but not in the traditional sense. It's rich and messy, sad and knowing.