Unable to speak due to his injuries, Adrien scratches a single word onto the blackboard by his bed. The word is 'Clémence' - the name of a pretty girl with whom he shared a brief tryst before the war. In a swift, furious gesture Adrien changes the word to 'Démence' - French for 'dementia'. It's a stark, intense and incredibly moving sequence that's dazzling in its simplicity and indicative of the power of Dupeyron's unflinching film.

Depicting Adrien's lengthy recuperation and his eventual struggle to reintegrate himself in society, The Officers' Ward is an unquestionably challenging proposition. Viewers will find it hard to shake off the film's residue, for few recent movies - French or otherwise - have offered as disturbingly vivid and relentlessly harrowing a portrait of the ravages of war.

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This is the work of a director who is supremely confident of his own abilities and fully aware of the potency not only of the images onscreen but also of each and every noise in his picture. The film's sound design makes even the most incidental occurrences (rain on an umbrella, chalk on a blackboard) resonate horribly from the screen.

Worst of all is the bedridden Adrien's own voice, a gurgling half-cry filled with anguish. The sound of his pain is perfectly matched to Tetsuo Nagata's haunting cinematography, which gives the ward a ghostly green aura.

As gruelling as it may prove, The Officers' Ward is ultimately a film about how wounds heal and hearts mend. Dupeyron manages to temper these proceedings with moments of unexpected humour. Impressively, the director concludes Adrien's trajectory with a conclusion that's uplifting without striking an artificial note.

Chris Wiegand