I think Dumont’s film is unfinished in the sense that some paintings are; that is, some parts of the “canvas” are only sketched in while other parts are fully realized. As a mannerist portrait of a few individuals, it’s often amazing; as a spiritual statement about suffering in the contemporary world, it almost lives up to its title; for its blunt depictions of sex, it’s about as carnal in an unvarnished way as filmmaking can get; and as a visual rendering of an area of northern France (Dumont’s hometown, also the setting of his first feature, The Life of Jesus), it’s pretty impressive. But as a police procedural, it’s unsatisfying, far from being worked out in all its details.

Some of the details are even in direct conflict with some of the virtues I listed. For one thing, as Dumont pointed out in an interview with Toronto critic Mark Peranson, the film doesn’t qualify in any way as “realist,” though the nonprofessional actors and the locations may occasionally foster that impression—and lead one to expect a verisimilitude in the plot and the psychology of the characters that the film doesn’t furnish.

There’s nothing wrong about any of this. Given Dumont’s Dostoyevsky-like ambitions, it’s the most honorable sort of failing imaginable. Yet because it’s a movie and not a painting or a symphony, this failing has made some people angry. Last year a Cannes jury headed by David Cronenberg awarded L’humanité the grand jury prize and awards for best actor (Emmanuel Schotte) and actress (Severine Caneele, in a tie with Rosetta’s Emilie Duquenne), and the international press was scandalized. That both Schotte and Caneele were nonprofessionals contributed to the outrage, but other issues relating to “professionalism” were also at play—above all, conformity to genre expectations. The dramatic payoff in Dostoyevsky is hardly the same thing as the dramatic payoff in a serial-killer mystery, and anyone looking for the latter clearly felt cheated.

Excerpt from Jonathan Rosenbaum's review at the Chicago Reader located HERE.