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Five-year-old Aurelie (Hinderchied) and her teenage sister Christelle (Virginie Guinand) are spending the summer with their grandmother following their parents' divorce.
The girls are hoping that their mother will visit, but it's their burly, volatile father Francky (Riaboukine), recently suspended from the Marseilles police force, who pitches up.
He's welcomed by his younger brother Alex (Cervo), an errand boy for a crooked club owner, although he and Francky are stunned by the reappearance after a 15-year absence of their other sibling Coco (Blancan), who claims to have served in the Army and the Foreign Legion.
The trio celebrate their reunion, yet Coco's increasingly erratic behaviour can't be ignored.
The award-winning debut feature of French writer and director Hélène Angel, "Skin of Man, Heart of Beast" has been given a deserved if belated British release.
Unflinching in its depiction of male violence, it portrays an environment in which the use of physical force is part and parcel of everyday life. [The father of the clan, a veteran of the war in Algeria, shot himself.]
Angel presents events partly from the perspective of Aurelie and Christelle, and infuses the film with the sensibility of a particularly nightmarish fairytale. The powerfully-acted characters are connected by the fact that they are troubled by traumatic dreams.
Christelle, for example, imagines that she and her younger sister are literally devoured by the family; Coco wakes up screaming; whilst Alex's dream of his father is actually a chilling memory.
And, whereas many French films depict the countryside as a pastoral idyll, here nature itself is harshly unforgiving, the arid landscapes a reflection on the barrenness of human lives.
In French with English subtitles.
