Michel Franco’s follow up to 2012 bullying drama After Lucia is the intimate English language drama, Chronic starring Tim Roth in one of his best performances in years. He is tender and alive, filled with a sense of belonging and yet not quite of this world. Roth plays David, a care worker in LA who works with terminally ill patients but not everything is as it seems when it turns out that perhaps David needs his patients more than they need him. 

Chronic is a subtle and quiet look at a very specific moment in David’s life – Franco has clearly decided for the audience this is what they need to know and perhaps also made decisions about what the audience can be kept in the dark about. There is a sense of mystery to the life on screen; who is the girl he seems to be stalking on Facebook and why is he obsessed with her? Why does he spend so much time running throughout the film and why does he slowly work at getting his patient’s families out of their lives so they come to rely solely on him? But for all this mystery, Chronic reminds the audience that at it’s heart is an intense and magnificent character study of one man. There is reference here and there to these moments in his life but this film isn’t looking for shocks and it doesn’t want to fix what may have gone wrong before this moment, instead it focuses on what is going on right now.

By no means is Chronic an easy watch but by the end you feel rewarded and grateful that Franco and Roth have offered something so intimate and direct to the audience. The film mostly plays out like a series of vignette’s; he visits his patients and works with them, he spends a moment with their families and he spends moments in dire solitude. There is also a stunning balance between life and death in this film, something that is so rarely seen on screen – in one particular sequence you aren’t sure whether the way he is handling a body, tending and cleaning her means that she is alive or dead. But Franco is also not scared of what he shows on screen – at another moment, David cleans the body of a patient in the bath, she is decrepit and frail and Franco’s camera respects that by staying away, keeping still and just letting David get on with his work.

It is rare for a film like this to come along and so hard to bring an audience to it, it forces those watching to think about uncomfortable things. But Chronic goes one step further, narratively there are very few films that work like this, leaving the audience with questions about the life of the character they are watching but being very frank from the start that it isn’t interested in trying to answer them. Instead it’s involvement is what those circumstances have left and how this person works with them now.