The Birthday Party review – grimly compulsive unhappy occasion in deepest France

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Cannes film festival: This could be better paced but the crisis which descends on an up-against-it dairy farm is delivered by some very memorable goons There’s nothing like a home-invasion suspense thriller to provide a change of pace in the Cannes competition, and Léa Mysius’s film – adapted from the French bestseller Histoires de la Nuit by Laurent Mauvignier – isn’t at all bad, although it runs out of narrative steam in the third act and one particular shock-twist appears to unshock and untwist itself. Yet the film certainly delivers some sinister rural strangeness in the France profonde countryside and some gonzo shootouts; plus there is a ripe turn from Benoît Magimel, who with every film seems to morph further into a cross between Gérard Depardieu and Christopher Walken. In a very remote bucolic village, Thomas (Bastien Bouillon) is a hardworking dairy farmer who took over the family smallholding after his father killed himself. After a whirlwind romance, he married Nora (Ha...
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Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives review – fresh take on pregnant-woman-in-peril horror

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Unfolding in what looks like a single take, Thomas Sieben sends his protagonist into a house that’s haunted by historical trauma

When Maria (Nilam Farooq) shows up 37 weeks pregnant at the attractive but remote country home of her husband Viktor (David Kross), you sense immediately that no good can come of this. If a character is pregnant in a film, it’s about even odds that said pregnancy will function as a way to increase their vulnerability – though not all films take this as far as this nifty little low-budget horror movie from talented German director Thomas Sieben, which combines the haunted house subgenre with pregnant-woman-in-peril to nicely nerve-jangling effect.

Occult horror always needs a starting point, a first evil from which the later ghosties and bumps in the night derive. Some films take as their inciting incident a broader historical crime or atrocity and it’s into this category Home Sweet Home falls. The Herero and Nama genocide, conducted by imperial German forces against indigenous people in what is now Namibia, was the first genocide of the 20th century, and is the basis for subsequent terrors visited upon our heavily pregnant heroine. Paying a price for the actions of previous generations is a big theme in German horror, but by looking to an earlier period than the horrors of the Nazi regime, Sieben reminds us that genocidal white supremacism was not invented in the 1930s.

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