The world fell for Laure Calamy when she played the permanently frazzled PA Noémie in French series Call My Agent!. Since then, she has become a major fixture in French cinema, notably in the bracingly intense working-life drama Full Time. There are traces of Noémie’s wide-eyed gawkiness in Calamy’s role in Sébastien Marnier’s The Origin of Evil, but her character here inhabits a very different world. She plays a woman employed in a fish-packing plant while her lover (Suzanne Clément) serves a prison sentence. One day, she finally does something she has been contemplating nervously: she travels to the Côte d’Azur and announces to well-heeled restaurateur Serge Dumontet (Jacques Weber) that she is his illegitimate daughter.
Serge welcomes her cordially while the other Dumontets are contemptuously high-handed. Soon, though, she finds the family opening their mansion doors with lofty graciousness — only for her to realise that everyone has different motives for welcoming her.
So, an outsider settles into the household of a wealthy, neurotic clan and causes ripples . . . Without revealing too much, this has more than whiff of the much-discussed Saltburn , although Marnier’s film premiered a whole year before Emerald Fennell’s. In fact, The Origin of Evil is considerably subtler, not to say more coherent, even if it too has an erotically charged bath scene.
More than anything, Marnier’s film recalls the psychological thrillers once made by the French New Wave’s number one Hitchcockian, Claude Chabrol, with comparable acidic humour. In particular, Calamy has a wonderful moment when Serge gives his long-lost daughter a too-fond, too-menacing cuddle, and her smile turns to horror as she hears the vitriol he is spouting. Throughout, Calamy’s face is worth watching closely, as her expressions do not always mean what they appear to.
The casting yields razor-sharp character sketches from Weber, a revered grandee of stage and screen, as a dethroned king rather harder to sympathise with than Lear. Dominique Blanc plays his wife Louise, an obsessive collector of pricey junk, with a positively regal line in casually poisonous put-downs. Doria Tillier exudes chic, chilly haughtiness as their executive daughter.
The twists are elegantly serpentine: just when you think you have spotted one coming, the next slithers right past you. It all goes a little haywire towards the end, but overall this is a relishably sour amuse-bouche and one of the most entertaining offerings from French cinema in ages.
★★★★☆
In UK cinemas from March 29