Worth: $12.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Alice Pol, Eddy Mitchell, Pablo Pauly, Miou-Miou, Pascale Arbillot, Zabou Breitman, Gustave Kervern, Adrien Guionnet
Intro:
… a lot of fun …
In Murder Party, brilliant but reserved architect, Jeanne (Alice Pol) has been summoned by César Daguerre (Eddy Mitchell), a board game mogul who wishes to hire her to redesign his already palatial home.
After a less than successful meeting, César winds up dead while Jeanne and his family are held hostage by the killer. Only ever heard over the mansion’s speaker system, the killer invites the hostages to play a series of larger-than-life interpretations of Cesar’s famous games. Fail to play, and you die. Play the game wrong, and you die. Pretty straightforward in terms of rules, really. The killer even offers up clues as to who they are, inviting the ‘guests’ to guess their identity. However, falsely accuse any of your fellow hostages of being the killer and… Well, you get the idea.
Despite the potential to be a bloody horror movie, Murder Party is more of a knockabout farce. Pleskof follows Jeanne running from room to room trying to solve the crime, whilst being hindered by Cesar’s family, including novelist wife Salomé (Pascale Arbillot), short-tempered sister Josephine (Miou-Miou), and lothario son Theo (Pablo Pauly).
Despite the stakes at hand, all of them instead rake over previous familial disagreements, while taking numerous pot shots at each other. Take, for example, Josephine’s disappointment when she realises that in a game where family members must fire arrows at the ones they love the most, no one is lining up to shoot at her.
Filmed in vibrant colours and containing exuberant performances from the cast, Murder Party mines a lot of its humour out of these clashes. Even the family butler Armand (Gustave Kervern) manages to get a few digs in at the expense of his employers. In a sense, we have Knives Out meets Saw meets Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.
Where Murder Party has the potential to lose focus is during a third act reveal, that is either going to have you jumping with both feet into the absurdity or have you scratching your head at its inclusion. Thankfully, Pol’s performance gives the film some of its best laughs at this point, as the by now thoroughly frazzled Jeanne uncovers more secrets buried in the Daguerre dynasty.
A whodunnit romp, Murder Party is, to be succinct, a lot of fun. If you allow yourself to surrender to its charms, you’d be hard pushed to come out the other end without a big smile on your face.
