The Five Devils review – superpower sense of smell in intriguingly weird psychodrama
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A child’s Perfume-style ability enables her to witness emotional crises in her parents’ past, in this disquieting movie
There are some intriguing ingredients in the mix for this weird, contrived supernatural psychodrama from French director Léa Mysius; some strong performances too, and a genuinely stunning final image. For good or ill, I can imagine M Night Shyamalan wanting to remake it for Hollywood. But somehow it doesn’t all come together, delivering neither the stab of actual fear nor the satisfaction of real, plausible psychological insight.
The setting is Isère near the French Alps. The always excellent Adèle Exarchopoulos carries the movie in the role of Joanne; she works at the local sports centre and is unhappily married to Jimmy (Moustapha Mbengue), a guy from Senegal. The tensions in their marriage are made much worse when Jimmy reveals that his sister Julia (Swala Emati) is coming to stay; a disturbed woman whose history with them both is disquieting. And under all this is the extraordinary figure of their 10-year-old daughter Vicky (Sally Dramé) who is subject to racist bullying at school and has a superpower sense of smell: she can recognise anything from its scent, like the hero of Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume or Dr Hannibal Lecter.
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