The Dardenne brothers return to form with searing film Tori and Lokita

Twenty-six years have passed since Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne came to international notice with their searing portrait of human trafficking, La Promesse (The Promise). The Belgian co-directors have since led a social-realist double life: feted at Cannes, while making stark, eloquent films about characters on the margins. Lately, their powers seemed to have dwindled. Now, with Tori and Lokita, comes another story of migration, and a potent return to form.

Always unflinching film-makers, the Dardennes open with a long hold on a single face: this is Lokita (Joely Mbundu), a 16-year-old migrant from Benin, here in the brothers’ eternal stamping ground of Liège. She is clearly on the cusp of panic, revealed to be that figure most loudly demonised by sections of Europe’s press and political class: an undocumented refugee, lying to the authorities about her circumstances. She claims to be the older sister of Tori (Pablo Schils), a sweet if rascally 12-year-old orphan. (Both young actors are exceptional.) In fact, the two are only de facto siblings — having met en route to Belgium, they are furiously keen to stay together.

For a time the film simply observes the children’s desperate, ongoing scrabble for money. At a neighbourhood pasta joint, they sing for the customers: the scene might almost be sweet. But the owner’s real business is drugs, and Tori and Lokita are his runners. As the boy arrives with a stash at a party, none of the guests are much perturbed by his age. Young and middle-class, we wonder if they might watch arthouse films in their free time.

The Dardennes’ spare style can be mistaken for simplicity. Simple is a strange word for the moral knots of what the children must do to survive, or the film’s mesh of predatory adulthood: traffickers, the restaurant owner, Lokita’s mother demanding she send more money back to Benin. And at the heart of it all is another enduring concern of the brothers: the fate of goodness. Because for all the brutality around them, Tori and Lokita retain exactly that — and 26 years after The Promise, the world still so seldom does.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas now