I Can’t Sleep (1994) might have been a thriller, given that it features a serial killer targeting the elderly and lonely. Yet, while Claire Denis was inspired by a real-life case that horrified the Parisian neighbourhood of Montmartre between 1984 and 1987 — in which 21 old people were murdered by a young, Black, gay man — she rejects a sordid exploitation of the theme and associated cinematic devices like suspense, instead taking us in a different direction. Early on we find out quite casually who the murderer is, a character in the film just like many others who appear and intermingle without any coherent sense of connection. The camera wanders from one to the next as if running as if it has lost its centre of gravity. Daiga is a young Lithuanian woman who arrives in Paris in an old car with no money, barely any belongings, lots of cigarettes and two phone numbers, in search of the acting work she has been promised. She ends up as a cleaner, living in a hotel owned by a friend of her great aunt. Also living in the hotel is Camille, a gay cross-dresser, and his white lover, both of whom are immersed in the gay subculture of Paris’s outskirts. Next, we visit Camille’s brother, Théo, a musician and illegal worker caught in a marital conflict: he wants to return to Martinique with his son, but his wife wants to stay. These characters all have different backgrounds, circumstances and objectives, but their paths intersect as they build Claire Denis’s singular and original filmic narrative — captured by Agnès Godard’s fabulous cinematography — around particular themes and concerns.

The concept of the Other, for example, who lives a diffuse and lost alterity or identity. Without proselytising, the film brings into focus the diversity of post-colonial societies following earlier periods of migration. The protagonists live in a mixed, peripheral neighbourhood and lead clandestine or exiled lives. For that reason, they invent their own rules for survival. Africans, West Indians, Lithuanians and Russians, to whom we can add homosexuals, cross-dressers and even the isolated elderly. The city that is home to these apathetic and stateless beings is a space of alienation, loneliness and ostracism.

Yet the Other elicits not only rejection but also curiosity and desire, and this is what underpins the significance of Denis and Godard’s cinematography of bodies and gestures, filmed as if they were a choreographed dance. The weight of these bodies is superimposed on the narrative and fuels Godard’s stunning photography. The camera clearly wishes to appropriate these bodies that roam through the margins of the city and, above all, dance. One of the most poetic images is the sensual, moving scene in which, shortly after we discover Camille is the “monster”, we see him dance and sing “Le Lien Défait” in a gay nightclub. He moves languidly in his black velvet dress, barefooted, lightly touching the walls and other bodies around him. His gaze is mysterious, opaque, detached. There is also the dance between Daiga and Ninon, the owner of the hotel, to the sound of “Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procul Harum. These two distinct bodies with their differing backgrounds seem to disagree with each other, and Ninon’s seductive gestures — as she remembers the youth she finds reflected in the young Lithuanian — fail to draw Daiga out of her indifference. They are two solitary beings. Dance also gives us brief moments of joy in the contact of two bodies, such as those of the elderly migrant couples at the club where Théo performs, and at the birthday party for Camille’s mother, in which her sons dance happily with her. Nevertheless, there is still a tension and repulsion between the brothers, as if Théo guesses at the denouement that will arrive shortly after.

The body acts as matter for various senses and is the base on which the narrative is built. Words count for little, since it is what is left unsaid that interests Claire Denis. These factors — confrontation, desire and repulsion in the intimacy of these bodies — are what interconnect these disjointed stories.

Then, finally, there is the amoral gaze of the director, who places no value judgement on the murderer or the motives that lead him to kill. Camille is treated with neither empathy nor abhorrence. He is capable of smoothness that is both seductive and violent, though never very graphic, towards his lover and elderly victims. His gestures as he dances, eats and makes love are filmed in exactly the same way as his gestures as he kills. And right to the end, after he has been arrested, Camille’s apathy persists and his personality remains opaque. His brother’s path is also one of indifference, since his goal is to leave for Martinique. The same is true of Daiga, who, taking advantage of Camille’s incarceration, keeps the stolen money and leaves again in her old car, taking barely any belongings, lots of cigarettes and, this time, plenty of money. Claire Denis finds a way of dissimulating evil within a kind of dramatic atonality, transforming the film into a masterpiece that is both poetic and dark. It has the appearance of disconcerting simplicity, but is in fact a puzzle in which the individual pieces do not fit. It does not allow us to get comfortable or familiar, instead offering strangeness, perturbation and the possibility of different feelings and experiences.

One might call it a post-modern kind of film noir because it takes us to a peripheral urban reality against the criminal backdrop of the shadowy parts of a city, inhabited by people who are failed, marginalised and alone. As a film it does not let us rest. We resist going to sleep, because being alone is the path towards death.