Actress Annette Bening is portraying a Red Cross social worker in “The Search,” a film that follows an orphan in the Second Chechen War that started in 1999, according to this article from the Associated Press.

The film comes from Michel Hazanavicius, director of “The Artist,” a light-hearted black-and-white film about a silent film star that snagged five Oscar Awards in 2012.

“The Search” covers much darker subjects. In the film, a nine-year-old boy named Hadji (actor Abdul-Khalim Mamutsiev) and his two siblings are left on their own when Russian troops kill their Muslim parents.

Hadji becomes separated from his sister and drops his infant brother off on the doorstep of a local family and hitches a ride to parts unknown.

Hadji finds himself in a Red Cross refugee camp where he meets a social worker named Helen (Bening). However Hadji runs off when he sees soldiers who remind him of the ones who killed his parents.

Eventually he finds himself in the care of Carole (actress Berenice Bejo), a European Union aide who is compiling a record of human rights abuses in Chechnya. Carole is at first resistant to her new role as caretaker but slowly warms toward Hadji.

The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this week but did not get favorable reviews. And Indie Wire criticized Bening’s role:

The screenplay doesn’t really work when it comes to the individual scenes either: plot contrivances or coincidences abound, with more than one character acting like an idiot in order to draw out the inevitable reunion (Bening’s character may be the most negligent NGO employee in history), and the dialogue exchanges are mostly clunky and on-the-nose.

It is unclear when the film will get a wider release.

Benning, 55, who was born in Topeka, Kansas and raised in California, has a film career that has lasted more than 30 years.

She has appeared in “The Grifters,” “American Beauty,” and “Mars Attacks!”

Bening has been married to actor Warren Beatty since 1992. The couple has four children.