Nathalie Chazeaux (Isabelle Huppert) is a married professor of philosophy, with two adult children, a sunny, book-lined Parisian apartment, and several published works to her name. Success has granted her self-assurance, at least in public. Early in Things to Come (or L’Avenir, to give the film’s French title), we watch her cross a student picket line without compunction, the arguments of the young protestors seeming to bounce off her. At home, over a family lunch, her husband, Heinz (André Marcon), also a philosopher, teases her about the gradual retreat of her youthful ideals. ‘Okay, I was a communist,’ she says defensively. ‘No shame.’ Who changes, and why, and how one lives with it – these knotty questions underpin a film that nevertheless proceeds with subtlety and wit.

Things to Come is a portrait of a woman who loses nearly everything that she thought she could rely on, but it isn’t a tragedy, much less a melodrama. In the lead role as Nathalie – and she appears in nearly every scene – Huppert is resolutely unsentimental, and often funny. Nathalie is competent but also a bit fretful, understandably so, given that she is pressed upon not only by her husband and students, but also by her publisher, and especially by her histrionic mother, Yvette (a perfectly formed performance from Édith Scob), who threatens to kill herself every few days. With all these demands upon her time and attention, Nathalie is almost always in a rush, and sometimes the camera follows her in a flurry.