Permeated by the strains of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and with much of its exterior photography shot on the rugged coast of Brittany, music, landscape, and symbolism are writ large in Hanna Slak’s Not a Word. The writer-director’s seventh feature tells the story of Nina (Maren Eggert), a high-profile Berlin orchestra conductor who is under intense pressure to prepare an important concert of Mahler’s work. At home, her teenage son Lars (Jona Levin Nicolai) has become distant and unresponsive, but Nina is so preoccupied with her work that it doesn’t occurs to her that his moodiness might be connected to the disappearance of a 13-year-old girl from his school. When she’s called away from an audition because Lars has fallen from a window at his school, Nina at first fears he may have jumped. With Germany’s tabloid press speculating about the girl’s macabre end, and as her son grows more withdrawn and angry, she begins to suspect something far worse about Lars’ connection to the missing girl. She hopes he will cough up some answers during a weekend together at their summer house on an Atlantic island but, between her awkward overtures, his increasing hostility and her mounting paranoia, she makes no progress. With her concert approaching and her boy inaccessibility, events ensure that Nina loses all control of the situation. Slak’s film engages the audience rather differently than classic arthouse cinema, grafting genre tropes onto the auteur conventions of this quiet family drama. Adjusting various nobs of the cinematic machine — characterisation, camerawork, location, score — Not a Word veers toward psychological thriller. While the film’s first act stokes uncertainty through Nina’s paranoia and Lars’ adolescent awkwardness, the second shifts the action to an isolated location, using dramatic passages from Mahler (and interludes from Amélie Legrand’s more discreet score) and ominous weather to infuse the proceedings with dread.Jim Quilty