Starring Isabelle Huppert, some critics are acclaiming it as her best film since Beau Travail (a personal favourite, and on my list of the Best Films Of All Time. Though, in fairness, that's quite a long list).
White Material is set in a nameless Francophone African country which is spiralling out of control. "Rwanda" is never mentioned, but the parallels are clear.
Huppert's Madame Vial runs a coffee plantation where she's queen of all she surveys; she's dealt with problems before, and this looks, to her, like just another. But it isn't, and the sense of the country closing in on her and her family is inexorable and gripping and vile.
The casual brutality meted out to her neighbours is what we have come to expect from such situations, but it is still deeply shocking. The brutalisation of small children -- turned into remorseless and conscience-free killing machines -- is here depicted in all its horror.
There are occasional distractions, mostly provided by the luscious Nicolas Duvauchelle, who plays Huppert's lazy son. He gives us a glorious full-frontal, but in circumstances which are not really conducive to pervy enjoyment.
Huppert's performance, as a woman trying to hold everything together, is extraordinary.
The film left me with a powerful urge to re-watch two others: Don Cheadle's Oscar-nominated turn in Hotel Rwanda (a powerful if ultimately unsatisfactory film)...
... and the extraordinary documentary Shake Hands with the Devil: the journey of Roméo Dallaire. Dallaire was the Canadian general in charge of the UN Mission to Rwanda as the country began to collapse on itself.
Dallaire was given a hopelessly inadequate force but, despite ultimately begging the Security Council for reinforcements, he and his men were left to watch impotently as hundreds of thousands of people were butchered (for which the permanent members of the Council should be reviled).
The horror of that experience can be seen etched onto Dallaire's face as he returns to the country, to revisit the scenes of these crimes and to try to exorcise them from his nightmares. Unsurprisingly, Dallaire suffered a nervous breakdown on his return to Canada, a broken man. And he was "just" a witness, not a victim.
We are also witnesses through White Material, and it is both a gripping film and an important one.
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