I went to the Classic in Elsternwick on Tuesday wanting to like this film. The French press cheered it: Télérama, Les Inrockuptibles, Le Parisien and Libération praised it, and the program promised a “gripping marital thriller”. Ninety-four minutes later I walked out onto Gordon Street having felt almost nothing. The subject is serious. The film mistakes stillness for depth.

Gil (Monia Chokri), a camera assistant, meets Jacques (Niels Schneider), a businessman, in Dubai. It all moves fast: a pregnancy, a rabbi, a wedding, a big house with nobody near it, and then the rules. Jacques is the more observant, and his piety comes with conditions: friends who drop away, a baby monitor that watches her as much as the child, calls that never stop, and a job offer he objects to. Think good, she is told, and it will be good. Over six years, in chapters that jump back and forth, the line hardens into a cage.

Coercive control is made of small things, and Nakache, who made her name with comedies, goes looking for it in surfaces: water, Gil’s face in close-up, a kitchen, a corridor, a line of Jewish teaching on each title card. Sylvestre Vannoorenberghe’s images are composed with care. But a film is not an exhibition of stills, and this one keeps asking us to admire a frame while nothing inside it happens.

The time-jumping is what the critics argued over, and I side with the doubters. Each time the pressure on Gil builds, the film cuts to another year and the tension leaks out of the room. There is no score, which can be brave; here it is one more thing withheld from us.

Chokri, who won best actress at Angoulême for this, is the reason to stay: a clever woman who cannot quite believe what is being done to her, played mostly with her eyes. Schneider has the harder job, because the script gives Jacques no interior: soft-spoken, correct, immovable, and we never learn what made him. Clémentine Célarié, as Gil’s mother, brings warmth to her few scenes, and the film comes alive whenever she is in it. That is rarely.

“A film is not an exhibition of stills, and this one keeps asking us to admire a frame while nothing inside it happens.Dr Dvir Abramovich

This is not an attack on Judaism. Nakache never mocks the rituals; it is a man, not a faith, who turns them into instruments. Cahiers du Cinéma called it demonstrative to the point of absurdity. I would not go that far. It is a lecture with beautiful photographs, delivered by actors who deserved a drama.

Think good and it will be good, Jacques tells his wife. I thought as hard as I could. It wasn’t.