The Five Devils

CinemaSerf6/10

Apr 1, 2023

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"Vicky" (Sally Dramé) lives with her school swimming coach mother "Joanne" (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and fireman father "Jimmy" (Moustapha Mbengue). Despite a fair degree of quite nasty teasing from her schoolmates, she is a happy enough child who has an astonishing gift. She has the most acute sense of smell. She can differentiate between natural and man-made scents - she can even sniff her mother out in the woods, at a distance, amongst all the other fragrances. The appearance of her aunt "Julia" (Swala Emati) causes upset though. She has just been released from prison and her arrival at their home seems to unleash in the young girl an enhanced set of powers that allows her to see into the past, as if she were a bystander, and slowly a story of lust, love and violence is revealed. It's an intriguing premiss, but somehow it just never really stays focussed long enough to become interesting. Some of the characters - especially the young Dramé are engaging enough, but the story itself is weak and underwhelming. It's not that it is boring, it isn't: it's that for too long nothing happens and then when something does, it is usually seen through the eyes of a child far too innocent to fully appreciate (I hope) what she is witness too. There is plenty of sexual fluidity here, and even a bit of tragedy at the end, but for the most part it's a jigsaw puzzle of a film with too many pieces that either don't fit or don't matter. It kills one hundred minutes easily enough, but I doubt I will ever watch it again.

Léa Mysius has created a fascinating study here in The Five Devils. It reminds me a lot of Kubrick's horror, The Shining. Both films revolve around a protagonist that is a child gifted with the "Shining", the gift of "seeing" what others do not. The common thread is that the gift is really a metaphor for how much adults underestimate what a child sees, hears, and understands. Mysius uses magic surrealism as the vehicle for her exposition. It's quite charming and exciting. It's very well done and worth the accolades, even though I felt the script had just a few faults that took me away from complete enjoyment.