Haunting, harsh, beautiful. Claire Denis' latest film bears her trademark elliptical narrative and dreamlike intensity, but, for once, is this enough, in this tale of deluded obsession at the end of a moribund way of life? Her own background - she was born in France but brought up in Africa - means she is so good at conveying the feel of the continent, having seen for herself the odd lives of Europeans living in the curious mixture of languid ease and a dirt-ingrained scrabbling of a living off the land.

In an unspecified Francophone country there's chaotic civil war, while the Vial coffee plantation is being held together by frazzled but determined Maria (Isabelle Huppert).The household is not a healthy one - The patriarch, her father in law (Michel Subor) is old and sick, his son Andre (Christopher Lambert) a realist, fretting to get away, and his grandson Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), pallid and pampered, spends most of his time in bed. A fractured narrative shows us Maria's frantic attempts to get back to the plantation on a day that turns out to be a fateful one for the Europeans - the remainder of the the film until the final sequences dealing in often confusing flashback, with the falling apart of the enterprise and Maria's dogged and increasingly wilful blindness to the deteriorating situation around her. As a portrait of a woman in serious denial, who could almost be one of Herzog's magnificent, obsessed loonies, Huppert is mesmerising, making her driven determination to see the world as she wants to see it, and her doting, blind love for her spoilt son entirely credible on the emotional level if not otherwise.

As ever Denis is an amazingly visceral film maker, her characters strongly, physically there - the wiry muscles of Maria as she hangs on to the outside of a bus, her grimy hands scrabbling through the coffee beans, and most of all the back of her neck, a surprisingly intimate place and also a base from which to share her view of the world. Denis' previous film, 28 Shots of Rum, utilised this intimacy to create an almost tangible portrayal of the warm and imprecise emotions of everyday life, but it doesn't always work, as in the 2001 Film Trouble Every Day, where a mix of sex, obsessive love and horrific violence finally taxes the rational in one so as to lessen the power of the film. Here too I felt my credulity being stretched in a way which almost fatally undermined the film's other considerable strengths. I didn't believe in that household, the hapless languid son or his seemingly rational but ineffectual father, who though actually witnessing the near murder of his son seems to just go along with Maria's dismissal of the danger. Outsiders so easily gain access to the house, wandering around the rooms stealing things, capable of killing all the inhabitants if they choose, and though there's a (not particularly hefty) padlock on the gate, the fences around seem non-existent. Lying half asleep in a rather fetid swimming pool doesn't seem that advisable. I'm not asking for realism here, just a kind of inner logic to hold it all together. This lack became, I'm sorry to say, almost tiresome at times.

Weaving in and out of the proceedings is the wandering presence of ‘The Boxer', charisimatic leader of the rebels, whom we first come upon dead in the Vial house, a figure who seems to be a hero, and yet is presumably responsible for the existence of the troubling amoral child soldiers who run amok, taking drugs and destroying. Africa here is presented as as unreadable and unknowable as Conrad's heart of darkness, but I longed for something a little bit less symbolic, more politically aware. We know that child soldiers for the most part become that way after horrendous abuse and experiences, not merely through a kind of joyous liberation from school.

But as a representation of one woman's nightmarishly heightened yet grittily real doomed tenacity it's very powerful. In the end Maria's tragedy is not that the Europeans are hated, but that they are not important. The civil war, the country, is an African affair. She and her culture will moulder away, so much ‘white material', a disliked curiosity, but an irrelevance.

Seen at Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, 4 July 2010