The brooding, moody With Great Joy succeeds because it takes a difficult and depressing subject matter and thoroughly engages the viewer.

That the subject -- fathering a handicapped child -- is too important and involves too many complex emotions for an honest treatment as film must have escaped director Lodewijk Crijns.

Either that or he ignored the fact that it could not be done -and did it anyway.

With Great Joy tells the story of Luc, his brother Adrian and Adrian's wife Els who happens to be Luc's old flame.

Adrian has been missing for 15 years when Luc receives a phone call telling him where his brother is.

When the brothers finally do meet, it is a clumsy reunion. Adrian's not very talkative. Luc is curious and wants to know what his brother is hiding. Els wants Luc back.

Discovering Adrian's secret leaves Luc with an important decision - and something of a moral dilemma.

The film is more meditation than story -- normally a prescription for disaster. But its deft handling by Crijns and co-writer Kim van Kooten make the 90 minute drama linger longer in the mind and soul than your average drama.

It does this by making the viewer in the end almost an active participant in Luc's story. And as soon as our identification with Luc is firmly entrenched -- complete with moralistic value judgments -- we (Luc) are then led to empathise with Adrian, a man wracked by shame and guilt, a man whose choices we were quick to condemn from our distant perch.

In the end this film shines a spotlight into the human spirit. How it fails us all at the best of times. It makes you realise how frail it is and makes you want to be a better person.

And if you're honest, you stop pretending that you could father a severely handicapped child and survive the experience.

Its difficult to fault the director's treatment in other aspects too. The style of the film is decidedly unpretentious.

Sets, costume and location are kept simple -- anything else, it seems, would have detracted from the central drama.

Many of the outdoor scenes are shot in the rain or otherwise bad weather -- lending a sombre, dark and depressing vibe to the film.

Camera work is sometimes unsteady, framing unusual -- again deliberate choices which add to the mood and imparts a sense of mystery.

By the film's last quarter, the viewer is gasping for some light. You don't get it. What you get instead is instruction that there is a certain kind of shame and a certain kind of fear that can envelop us the best of us.

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