Our Children

Directed by Joachim Lafosse, this Belgian French co production draws on a real 2007 tragedy in Nivelles, Belgium, in which Geneviève Lhermitte killed her five children. In the film, Murielle (Émilie Dequenne) marries Mounir (Tahar Rahim) and they have four children together, but the couple keeps living with André Pinget (Niels Arestrup), the doctor who raised Mounir since childhood. Pinget's financial support leaves the family dependent on him, and as the household grows more suffocating, postpartum struggles and the weight of two domineering men in her life push Murielle toward collapse. In the real case, Lhermitte likewise lived in a house provided by a doctor and had struggled with postpartum depression for years, was sentenced to life in prison at her 2008 trial, and died by euthanasia in 2023, on the sixteenth anniversary of the killings. The husband and doctor from the real events sued to block the film's release and lost. Émilie Dequenne won Best Actress in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, the film won four Magritte Awards, and it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Who it's for: Viewers who want to watch a psychological collapse unfold slowly, without the real tragedy behind it being sensationalized. Who it's not for: Not for anyone who can't handle a heavy, claustrophobic family drama, since the subject matter is genuinely distressing.