For a brief, enticing stretch of Guillaume Canet’s Karma, it appears to be a film in which Canet’s ex-wife Marion Cotillard plays an alcoholic employed at a Spanish sardine factory. We haven’t seen Cotillard do exactly that before, so that would be a novelty, and it might be nice to watch her in another working-class social drama, all these years after her Oscar-nominated turn in Two Days, One Night. But something about Karma’s sinister music tells us that Canet, who also co-wrote the film, has grimmer matters in mind. We only see the sardine factory once before the film’s true plot kicks in.

What Karma is really about is a subject familiar to many an American consumer of streaming-service documentary series. No, it’s not about a scam artist or a mysterious campus murder. It is, instead, about a cult, a cloistered religious community run by an abusive false prophet. Canet and co-screenwriter Simon Jacquet have conceived of many rules and rituals for this slavishly devout sect, but they also keep things vague enough so as not to evoke any one particular religious tradition. French Catholicism may be the aesthetic foundation of the group, but its core beliefs center on one mortal man with his own byzantine set of codes and restrictions. 

Before we get to all that, though, Canet must establish the dramatis personae. Cotillard plays Jeanne, a Frenchwoman living in coastal Spain with her partner, Argentinian carpenter Daniel (Leonardo Sbaraglia). They seem madly in love, only with an emphasis on the “mad” part. Jeanne’s behavior is erratic — she drinks too much and she’s terribly cavalier with time when she’s babysitting her friends’ son, with whom she has a curiously close bond. We are told that she is the child’s godmother, but her devotion to him — careless as she can be when they are together — suggests a deeper connection waiting to be teased out. 

When the boy goes missing, Jeanne is the most obvious suspect. She was the last person seen with him, leading him down to a river bank, water bottle full of vodka in hand. It’s not looking good for poor Jeanne, and following the revelation of a major secret, she flees the country and returns to the harsh people who raised her, begging the forgiveness of the group’s tyrannical leader, Marc (Denis Ménochet). Daniel, meanwhile, tries to track down his runaway would-be bride while realizing he knows pretty much nothing about her. 

Canet compellingly sets the film in motion, venturing further and further down a dark hallway. The cult that Jeanne escaped is quite malevolent indeed, its stone-walled compound serving as a formidable prison for the men, women and children who live and suffer there in a frightened stupor. Marc makes an example of the penitent, powerless Jeanne, reminding the rest of his flock of the punishment for apostasy and using her rough time among the heathens as proof of why none under his control should ever want to trade his order for such modern sin and depravity. 

While Canet mostly keeps the film at lurid, potboiler temperature, there are salient sociopolitical points being made here — about powerful men’s proclivity for sexual violence, about the dangers of fanaticism. He manages some affecting melodrama, too, slowly zooming out to reveal the full picture of Jeanne’s operatically tragic life. Her subjugation is an extreme version of what many women experience across the planet: controlled, demeaned, kept. Even the soapiest impulses of the film can’t obscure the relevance of that. 

Adding to the film’s impact is Cotillard’s committed performance, an ever-shifting portrait of a woman both physically and mentally on the run. She keeps us guessing at Jeanne’s ultimate motives, which preserves the movie’s intrigue even when Canet’s storytelling sags. Ménochet is a scary wonder as Marc, a great bear of a man who is chillingly adept at hiding his rage and possessiveness under the guise of a gentle, enlightened ascetic. 

The film’s main flaw is in the design of its world, which too frequently strains logic. I don’t really buy, for example, that Marc would let the community’s older kids go to a nearby public school every day. That would be a massive threat to the hegemony established by the film, especially for people at their most curious, rebellious age. Canet has to do some gymnastics to sell several of his conceits, and a few reveals land with the thud of too-easy convenience. The ominous, solemn tone of the film is undermined when it has to stoop to such narrative shortcuts. 

Still, Karma is plenty engaging throughout. And it’s heartening that it’s a film at all; in the States, this same story would likely be stretched out into six or eight lugubrious hours and tossed into the teeming content bazaars of Apple or Amazon. Praise, then, must be given to Canet’s efficiency, his faith in the power of the right movie star and a narrative just substantial enough to hold our attention for the length of a feature. It does exactly that, sturdy enough to be taken seriously without being mistaken for high art.