Our Children, review - Telegraph If ever there was a picture about the more taxing demands of motherhood, and also wifehood, it's the finely wrought domestic drama Our Children, by Belgian director Joachim Lafosse. Based on a shattering true story, it depicts the piecemeal breakdown of Murielle, a depressive teacher played by Émilie Dequenne, star of the Dardenne brothers" Rosetta (1999), in a career-topping performance. Her marriage to a Moroccan immigrant, Mounir (Tahar Rahim), dictates an unusual household arrangement, since his surrogate father, a family doctor played by Rahim's Prophet co-star Niels Arestrup, is a permanent fixture in their lives. As Murielle gives birth to one child after another, Mounir shirks his duties as a father, leaving her hopelessly overburdened and in the grips of looming mental illness. It's not an easy watch, but Lafosse - who made the excellent mother-and-twins study Private Property (2006) - unpicks the family dynamics with moving candour. Each hurdle in Murielle and Mounir's lives is cleared only to be replaced by a taller one, and Murielle's insecurities are compounded by anxiety that she's merely her husband's ticket to economic success. His relationship with Arestrup's André, meanwhile, is a mysterious male business from which she feels bluntly excluded. Dequenne gives us a person barely holding it together even in her happier moments, with this well of despair constantly bubbling below - one sharp word from Rahim, whose love is a brutal, hair-trigger thing, and it threatens to engulf her. We know from the start that something truly awful is going to take place, and while the movie can't claim to explain this catastrophe entirely, it might have seemed foolhardy even to try.