A Tamil fighter flees Sri Lanka claiming asylum with two strangers to create a family and ease the asylum process. But life in Paris is violent too – will old fighting ways become necessary to protect his new family?

Dheepan is Jacques Audiard’s most Scorsese-like film, and all the better for it. It’s critical elevation (it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year) no doubt owes something to the salience of the refugee crisis, but it probably owes as much to the subtlety of the film’s analysis of migration and motivation.

A recurrent motif is the elephant, both real and in the invocation of Ganesh, the Hindu god, who represents the often incompatible boons of good fortune and wisdom. The desire for the trappings of success, and how this takes us away from wisdom, is central to the film’s story.

While lacking the grandeur of Audiard’s Un Prophet, it shares many of the same concerns about the construction of identity and the manner in which this is governed by the fluctuation between the state’s overpowering presence and its devastating absence, for example in the way that gangs carve out a territory within a prison, or in the way that refugees are first corralled and inspected and then dumped and deserted.

“A radical and bold film.” Independent.