After leaving empty for the Official Section of the Sitges Festival, it arrives on the billboard ‘The five devils’, second feature film by French filmmaker Léa Mysius. A subtle and contained family drama sprinkled with fantasy elementswhich you can already see on the billboard.
Total eclipse of the Heart
The film tells the story of Vicky, a lonely girl who has a peculiar gift: You can reproduce and collect any scent you like. The return of her aunt Julia will shake the relationship between Vicky and her mother and will awaken in her new powers that she did not know.
After her film debut with ‘Ava’, Léa Mysius returns to the cinema with ‘The Five Devils’. The proposal is simple and surprising at the same timeas it combines fantasy elements with a story that unfolds like a slow-paced family drama.
On the one hand, it presents us with a plot of coming of agein which one of the axes will be Vicky’s evolution from girl to teenager. A character characterized by the fear of growing up, aggravated by the constant harassment of his classmates and the dependent relationship he has with his mother.
With the excuse of his powers, which start from his sensitivity to smells but immediately give way to something else (we won’t tell you ahead of time because it’s worth discovering), Mysius tells us about that moment when childhood ends when our idealized image of the adult world is collapsing.
At the same time, in an implicit and quite subtle way, it touches on another theme that is deeply rooted in the coming of age and extends it to adulthood as well: the difference. Both Vicky and her mother or the rest of the adult characters they carry the weight of feeling different from their surroundings and it considers to what extent it is worth sacrificing oneself to be “like the others”.
Wide range of grays
Another strong point of the film is, precisely, the treatment of the characters. The title (which refers to the place where they live) already tells us that the director chooses to make a portrait nuanced and full of gray towards the main figures of the story.
The filmmaker approaches her characters with empathy but without indulgent concessions. We understand them and even sympathize to a certain extent, without idealizing or victimizing them in an exaggerated way. It is not a story of good and bad but of peopleand as such, they can also be unfair or selfish at certain times .
The cast manages to capture the inner world of these characters trapped in the past, highlighting newcomer Sally Dramé like Vicky and a great Adèle Exarchopoulos (‘The Life of Adèle’) as her mother.
It is also worth noting how Mysius launches into a dramatic story that could overflow at any moment. However, the filmmaker manages to keep him contained and sober, avoiding gimmicky drama that could have mercilessly wiped out the entire film.
Despite its fantastic elements, this is not a fast-paced story but one that takes its time in presenting each one’s situation to us and develops it elegantly, even leaving some elements to interpretation. The film does not seek to answer all the questions raised by the story. He prefers to leave them in the hands of the viewer, culminating in a denouement that adds a touch of mystery as a finishing touch.
‘The Five Devils’ is a interesting family drama sprinkled with fantasy, that tells us about the end of childhood and the weight of the past, through a cast of complex and nuanced characters. A very peculiar film that is going unnoticed in theaters and deserves a chance.