The Five Devils review – superpower sense of smell in intriguingly weird psychodrama
There are some intriguing ingredients in the mix for this weird, contrived supernatural psychodrama from French director Léa Mysius; some strong performances too, and a genuinely stunning final image. For good or ill, I can imagine M Night Shyamalan wanting to remake it for Hollywood. But somehow it doesn’t all come together, delivering neither the stab of actual fear nor the satisfaction of real, plausible psychological insight.
The setting is Isère near the French Alps. The always excellent Adèle Exarchopoulos carries the movie in the role of Joanne; she works at the local sports centre and is unhappily married to Jimmy (Moustapha Mbengue), a guy from Senegal. The tensions in their marriage are made much worse when Jimmy reveals that his sister Julia (Swala Emati) is coming to stay; a disturbed woman whose history with them both is disquieting. And under all this is the extraordinary figure of their 10-year-old daughter Vicky (Sally
Dramé) who is subject to racist bullying at school and has a superpower sense of smell: she can recognise anything from its scent, like the hero of Patrick
Süskind’s novel Perfume or Dr Hannibal Lecter.
But more than this: from the smell of a certain object associated with a person, she can go into a time-travel trance and witness emotional crises from these people’s pasts. I’m not exactly sure that the superpower-smell/ time-travel conflation works fully: either of these on their own would have been effective enough, and perhaps Mysius should have chosen just the one. At any rate, this creates a vivid, if semi-explained bond between Julia and Vicky in the present day and there are some great set pieces, though the movie is less than the sum of its elaborately odd parts.
• The Five Devils is released on 24 March in UK and Irish cinemas, and on 12 May on Mubi. It screens at the Fantastic film festival in Australia on 20 and 26 April.