The Origin of Evil
Directed by Sébastien Marnier
Running time: 1hr29 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Laure Calamy, Doria Tillier, Dominique Blanc, Céleste Brunnquell and Véronique Ruggia in The Origin of Evil
I don’t often say this, but thank goodness for the super-rich. At a time when satirists have to tread more carefully than before, the One Percent remain a reliable, 99%-approved comic target, whether in the acidic, close-to-the-bone social critique of Succession or the broader Cluedo hijinks of Saltburn and the Knives Out films. The Origin of Evil sits louchely somewhere between those two approaches. A riotous, escalatingly dark French comic thriller that got too little attention at the 2022 Venice festival, and has taken an awfully long time to reach UK screens, it’s arch, knottily plotted and gilt-edged with camp, but there’s bitter truth in it too.
It’s largely set, as these films must be, in a vast, resplendently over-decorated villa, stuffed to the gills with Chinoiserie and taxidermy. This one, on the secluded Côte d’Azur island of Porquerolles, keeps its residents cushioned in comfort but not contentment. Elderly tycoon Serge (Jacques Weber) regards his family with something close to contempt: his tacky online-shopaholic wife Louise (a hilarious Dominique Blanc), officious daughter George (Doria Tillier) and eye-rolling Gen-Z granddaughter Jeanne (Céleste Brunnquell) return his anti-affection with venom to spare.
Into this plush nest of bad vibes enters working-class fish-factory worker Stéphane (Laure Calamy), Serge’s unacknowledged daughter from a long-ago fling. Having recently lost her job and her home, it’s an opportune time to get in touch, though she claims she wants only to meet him. It’s the great beauty of Calamy’s dishevelled, initially ingenuous performance that we almost believe her. When she shows up, the family is neither surprised nor welcoming. Serge has a long history of conquests, after all — “some more attractive than others,” notes George, with a delicious disdain that encapsulates the film’s snippy comic tone. But when the grizzled, ailing patriarch unexpectedly warms to this down-home interloper, hackles are raised, and the game is afoot.
Marnier previously directed the tight, unnerving classroom psychodrama School’s Out, and has a knack for conjuring grand-scale genre atmosphere from a small, even claustrophobic setup. That heightened styling makes for some of the comedy in The Origin of Evil. Marnier throws jittery split-screens into the mix for the hell of it, and at one point orchestrates an elaborate crane shot merely to capture characters seated on a sofa, as if to self-consciously rejig the tropes of French drawing-room cinema.
It works: the film is fresh, breezy and very, very funny, and kept from silliness by the core humanity of Calamy’s presence. Stéphane isn’t quite all she appears, and Calamy — an MVP in the TV comedy Call My Agent!, which earned her comparisons to Olivia Colman that flatter both actors — in turn keeps shifting the tenor of her performance from guileless to guarded, all the while maintaining a kind of underdog integrity. She may not be all she claims to be, but hey, at least she isn’t rich. In this story, that’s heroic enough.
THE ORIGIN OF EVIL (2022) Written by Sébastien Marnier | Shot by Romain Carcanade | Edited by Valentin Féron and Jean-Baptiste Beaudoin
Now playing in selected UK cinemas.