Under the Sand.

Under the Sand * Written by Francois Ozon, Emmanuele Bernheim, Marina de Van, and Marcia Romano * Directed by Ozon * Starring Charlotte Rampling and Bruno Cremer * Winstar Cinema

Something dreadful must have happened to openly gay French filmmaker Francois Ozon on a seaside outing when he was very young. His beach movies are more disturbing than a morning party on Fire Island. A pleasant vacation turns calamitous in Ozon's 1997 film See the Sea, as a woman opens her home to a perverse young female backpacker and sees her kindness rewarded by having her baby kidnapped. And a day at the shore changes the landscape irrevocably for Charlotte Rampling in Ozon's new opus, Under the Sand.

See the Sea veterans will feel a chill of dark portent as Rampling's Marie Drillon, an English professor on summer break, walks over the dune with her husband, Jean (Bruno Cremer), and hits the sand. A casual glance reveals nothing wrong. It's a brilliant day, and the couple is so cozily in sync after 25 years of marriage that they can communicate their contentedness in utter silence. But then Jean gets up to go in for a swim, and he disappears moments later.

Ozon is a 33-year-old Parisian writer-director who doesn't do what we have come to expect from young gay filmmakers. Certainly, he doesn't have an ounce of camp in his bones (well, maybe a half ounce, in the bisexual menage a quatre Water Drops on Burning Rocks and the cross-dressing short A Summer Dress). He can't be bothered with angst-ridden coming-of-age tales. He can flash a cute male butt with the cheapest of them but usually in service of something sinister, like the murder-and-rape nightmare in which two teenagers become ensnared in Criminal Lovers.

Under the Sand is a portrait of a woman of a certain age in denial. Long past the point where one could reasonably expect the return of her husband, who has undoubtedly drowned at sea, Marie clings to his nonpresence like a life raft. At dinner parties she speaks of him in the present tense even as her best friend tries to interest her in a new man. When her husband's attorney admonishes her for overdrawing Jean's frozen assets, she tells him not to worry, she'll speak to Jean and he'll make it all right. And she imagines Jean is still living with her, exchanging small talk or hovering in the shadows while she makes love to another man.

In the endearing Truly, Madly, Deeply, director Anthony Minghella took an adoring widow's grief and turned it into a romantic comedy about learning to let go. There is nothing lovable about Under the Sand, an austere meditation on what can happen when the letting-go process gets stalled and warped. Ozon takes identifiably human behavior and pushes it to the brink, forcing us to question at what point a usually transient period of denial curdles into madness.

Ozon's dispassionate eye renders Marie's condition as creepy as it is irritating: After about a half hour of her batty self-delusion, you want to haul off and slap her. The film feels overextended even at just over 90 minutes; it would have worked much better tightened into a miniature, a la See the Sea. But Romping brings a manic intensity to Marie that is always compelling, and she looks terrific. We should all look so glam after 25 years married to a man so chubby and unresponsive; it's only a wonder he didn't just float away like Tom Hanks's Wilson volleyball.

Stuart is film critic and senior film writer at Newsday.