A sghar Farhadi is the Iranian auteur whose film-making style has always shown the high European influences of Antonioni and Haneke. He has in fact made two films in Europe: The Past in France and Everybody Knows in Spain.

Now he returns to France and the French language for this diverting, middleweight meta-drama about betrayal and about a supposed link between voyeurism and creativity: do writers spy on the characters they have brought to life?

It’s a riff or theme-variation on Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Love – with a twist of Hitchcock’s Rear Window – doggedly spinning a spider’s web out of itself. The result is intricate, elaborate, though a little nebulous.

Isabelle Huppert is Sylvie, a cantankerous fading writer, living alone in chaotic squalor in her messy Paris apartment, rattling out novels that no one wants to read on her Olivetti electric typewriter. No new-fangled laptops here.

Vincent Cassel and Virginie Efira.…