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It’s been nearly seven years since the devastating November 2015 terrorist attacks on Paris that left 137 dead, and while the effects of the tragedy have been indirectly felt in a surge of French films centered on terrorism, security fears and cultural conflict, filmmakers have largely shied away from direct dramatizations of the events and their fallout. Isaki Lacuesta shows no such hesitation in his ambitious, windingly structured “One Year, One Night,” which provides an explicit anatomy of trauma as experienced over the course of a year by a Franco-Spanish couple who survived the Bataclan nightclub massacre — itself reconstructed in claustrophobic, stomach-knotting flashbacks. Fictional but drawn from first-hand accounts, it’s a sprawling, empathetic work that sometimes loses clarity amid its sheer weight of feeling.

Poised to be an international arthouse breakthrough for its Spanish writer-director — who has twice won the top prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival, but remains...

A couple struggles to process the aftermath of the Bataclan terrorist attack in One Year, One Night, an affecting Berlin Film Festival competition title from Spanish director Isaki Lacuesta (Between Two Waters). Inspired by a book from Ramón González entitled Peace, Love and Death Metal, it’s based on recollections from real survivors of the 2015 attack in Paris, and the level of detail is compelling.

We first meet Frenchwoman Céline (Noémie Merlant) and her Spanish boyfriend Ramón (Nahuel Pérez) when they are wrapped in a foil recovery blanket, wandering dazed through the Paris streets and locking eyes with other survivors as they shiver and shine in silver in the dark.

The next morning, they try to carry on with their daily lives in their small Parisian apartment. But terrifying flashbacks and anxiety attacks begin to plague Ramón. Meanwhile, Céline goes back to her work at a...