DISGRACE (M) ****

Starring John Malkovich, Jessica Haines

Directed by Steve Jacobs

“The dog hated its own nature and began to punish itself.” Disgrace is a tough, uncompromising drama that centres on David Lurie, an emotionally chilly professor of poetry who spends his well-dressed days with an air of contemptuous ennui, yet inside beats the troubled heart of a predator and a racist.

When an inglorious affair goes awry, he escapes to his daughter Lucy’s farm where a sudden act of appalling violence forces him to reconsider his very being.

Conflict is everywhere, as black and white fight for control, both literally and symbolically: symbolism is the cornerstone of Disgrace.

From the mixed-race child Lucy is carrying, to the way her black neighbour inveigles himself into their lives, everything means something else. That it doesn’t crumble into the contrivance that trips many a literary transfer is a credit to Jacobs, who offers a restorative jolt to art house cinema.

As Lurie retreats from the edge to seek forgiveness, those initial steps are given a head-smacking potency by Malkovich’s symphonic performance, one grounded with the explosive force of change.

“I won’t let it go too far,” he says. But you know he will.

Disgrace paints a stunning portrait of a man and a country reconciling past and future in a fiercely divergent present.