Year:  2022

Director:  Sébastien Marnier

Rated:  MA

Release:  October 19, 2023

Distributor: Potential

Running time: 125 minutes

Worth: $18.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth

Cast:
Laure Calamy, Doria Tillier, Dominique Blanc, Jacques Weber, Suzanne Clément, Céleste Brunnquell, Véronique Ruggia Saura

Intro:
A gloriously snaking crime thriller which hooks the viewer almost immediately and doesn’t let go until the final frame.

Sébastien Marnier’s The Origin of Evil is Hitchcock or Patricia Highsmith via Claude Chabrol, which is far from damning praise. Led by the wonderful Laure Calamy (Full Time), the twist filled crime drama is as delightfully wicked as it is deliberately camp.

Calamy plays a woman recently released from prison, who is struggling to make ends meet at a fish packing plant. Her female lover is still in jail, jealous and tempestuous. Evicted from her boarding house, Stéphane (as we come to know her) is fast running out of options and decides to contact her extremely wealthy father, Serge Dumontet (Jacques Weber), who abandoned her and her mother many years ago.

Travelling to a seaside paradise, Stéphane is surprised at how welcoming Serge is. He invites her to his over-the-top mansion populated by his bitchy and vindictive wife, Louise (Dominique Blanc in superb form), his legitimate daughter, George (Doria Tillier), and George’s daughter, Jeanne (Céleste Brunnquell). Also ever present, is Louise’s faithful maid, Agnès (Véronique Ruggia Saura).

The women of the house are far from welcoming to Stéphane, who does her very best to sweetly fit in with them. What Stéphane soon becomes aware of, is a massive power struggle between Serge, who has recently had a stroke, and the women in his life. At first, they seem unnecessarily cruel to the ailing man, but Marnier has many surprises up his sleeve – the least being that Serge was, and remains, a vicious tyrant who is in every manner abusive to his family. Not only was he consistently unfaithful to Louise, he also shunned his homosexual son, who left the family never to be heard of again.

The women do not want Stéphane, a cuckoo in the nest, around Serge. Yet Serge keeps inviting Stéphane back to the mansion ostensibly to bond with her, but with something more specific in mind for his newly rediscovered daughter.

Laure Calamy is beguiling as the changeable Stéphane, who we find out also isn’t exactly who we think she is. She manages to be pitiful, charming, innocent, adaptive, and eventually something a great deal darker.

The real joy is in Marnier’s wicked screenplay, which he also directs with an eye for the most camp elements possible. The mansion is stuffed full of expensive trinkets, which Louise collects impulsively to piss Serge off. Louise herself is glorious, with her elaborate costumes and imperious manner – a manner that softens towards Stéphane as she sees which way the wind is blowing.

George’s teenage daughter Jeanne reveals to Stéphane that “family is poison” and that she can’t wait until she is eighteen and able to escape the suffocating group. Stéphane, who never had a family, seems desperate to fit in, but the Dumontets, under the punitive patriarchal rule of Serge, are dysfunction personified.

A gloriously snaking crime thriller which hooks the viewer almost immediately and doesn’t let go until the final frame, The Origin of Evil is the epitome of the mantra “Be gay, do crime.” It’s slick, clever, and a dark but undeniably good time.

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