I'm the King of the Castle

Thomas is the son of a wealthy man and lives almost alone in a large house in the French countryside. His father hires a widow to keep the place running, and her son Charles moves in with her. The father and the woman hope the two boys will become friends. But from the first moment Thomas sees Charles as an invader and sets out to drive him from the house. Régis Wargnier directed it from Susan Hill's novel, and it refuses to treat childhood as innocence. The bullying here happens somewhere the adults do not see and cannot see, and it deepens precisely because of their good intentions: nobody asks what is going on between the children. Jean Rochefort and Dominique Blanc play the parents. The telling raises the tension slowly and offers consolation nowhere.