What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

The motivational🍒 mulch behind 1,000 feel-good dramas has all but lost its power.

The great achievement of Jacques Audiard’🀅s visceral, relentlessly tense drama (based loosely on a collection of short stories by Craig Davidson) is that it manages to give this old cliché a bracing new life.

In the tall, dark and handsome tradition of Audiard leads, Romain Duris ( ) and Tahar Rahim ( ) befo💖re him, brooding Matt♐hias Schoenaerts plays Ali.

As th🐟e film opens, Ali arrives in a Cote d’Azur town, with his young son and not a penny to his name. He moves in with an estranged sister and begins to build a new life.

When he meets orca whale trainer Stephanie (Marion Cotilla🐷rd) in a club where he works, it seems a chance,🤪 meaningless encounter, unlikely to be repeated.

Then, several weeks later, when her lif𝄹e is changed by a disabling accident, she finds his number and calls&helli𝄹p;

Cotillard’s performance as Stephanie is flawlessly naturalistic, yet underpinned by all the emotional power necessary to play a woman in ওthe midst of total transformation.

When Stephanie’s accident plunges her into depression, Ali simply gets on with it, but his running, fighting, shagging physicality is exactly the inspi൲ration she needs to get on with it too.

The flipside of Ali’s vitality, though, is a recklessness that f꧒ills the film with foreboding.

has more heart-in-the-mouth moment🧸s than an artichoke eatin𒁃g contest. Ali’s bare-knuckle street fighting, his loving-but-neglectful parenting, his heedless involvement in anti-union spying all threaten imminent disaster for him and those around him.

In fact, the tension is so relentless that the crux of the drama becomes not, “Will something horrible happen?” (it will🧔) but rather, “When it does happen, will these characters survive? And how?” That, as it turns out, is the much more interesting question.

It isn’t perfect: the use of Katy Perry’s ‘Firework’ on the soundtrack and the final scene’s voiceover both verge on risible, but as A Prophet fans well know, Audiard has a sorcerer’s facility for suspending mystical moments in🔥 realism, like dust particles in sunlight.

Rust And Bone ⛦puts you through the wringer, but it’💫s well worth the pain.