THE FIVE DEVILS - Mark Reviews Movies

The Five Devils, Mubi

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 23, 2023

The past comes to life in The Five Devils, because, as the man once wrote, it's never really dead. A young girl finds herself in a past she could never know, though, in co-writer/director Léa Mysius' film. It's a drama that might not be as complex as its stakes and narrative gimmickry would suggest, but there is some real, haunting truth to the ideas that come to the fore of the material.

Mysius and Paul Guilhaume's tale is set in a town in the French Alps and primarily revolves around a mother-daughter relationship. The mother is Joanne (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a lifeguard and swim instructor at the local pool, and her daughter is Vicky (Sally Dramé), a clever and curious girl with a heightened sense of smell. Joanne puts her daughter's nose to the test in one scene, blindfolding the girl and instructing Vicky to find her mother amidst the scents of the forest near a lake where Joanne does a regular, cold-temperature swim. The girl's super-powered olfactory receptors turn out to be pretty precise.

Through inexplicable means, it's the girl's sense of smell that sends her on a series of trips to the past. Vicky's father Jimmy (Moustapha Mbengue) receives a call from his younger sister Julia (Swata Emati), whom he hasn't seen in a decade. He attempted to reconnect with her by way of a holiday card, and now, Jimmy has invited Julia to live with his family. Joanne isn't happy, and even though the girl has no idea why that is, her mother's doubts are enough to make Vicky suspicious of the aunt she has never met.

There's a lot of mystery here, and the way Mysius uses the initial, almost supernatural premise of Vicky's super-smell as a means of catching attention does pay off here—even if the plot device is a transparent gimmick. The point isn't how the story happens. It's that it does happen, as Vicky, such is one of her eccentric habits, mixes various concoctions of odors connected to her aunt, as well as a seemingly mystical ointment that Julia just happens to have in her purse. After taking a whiff of the first compound, the girl awakens in a parking lot and is passed by a group of teenage girls. One of them looks a lot like her mother, because it is Joanne—a younger version who's on a gymnastics team and, unlike now, has friends.

Despite the specific oddity of it, the whole of this conceit has a number of core truths to it. There's the fact of our inability to really know people, because the people Joanne and Jimmy and Julia are at this point in their lives are so far removed from the present-day selves—even though they look almost exactly the same—that it's like looking at strangers. That's another truth, because kids rarely think of their parents and relatives as kids themselves at some point in the past.

Vicky looks on, through a series of trips back to this defining period of the lives of her mother and father and aunt, and begins to understand why there's so much tension between so many people—including, her father (played by Patrick Bouchitey), and a co-worker named Nadine (Daphné Patakia), who has burn scars on half of her face—and Julia. Details emerge, mainly the fact that Julia was in prison before returning to town, and in one of the most compelling of the specific ideas put forth by the screenwriters, Julia can actually see her niece in the past—like a ghost of a future that her youthful self can't recognize, because what's to come in her life is nothing she imagined or wanted.

As for the specifics of who these characters and what these relationships were in the past, such details are best left to be discovered. It is impressive how much Mysius opens up the lives and emotional concerns of these characters—both in the past and, by direct comparison, in the present—by simply observing how much has changed for them circumstantially, how little has been altered on some core level, and the degree to which they have to hide or negotiate what they're feeling in order to maintain some kind of balance in their lives now.

The whole film feels like a subtle trick of perspective. Even though we see events in the present and the past through Vicky's eyes, her growing comprehension of the people her parents and aunt were back then and are now puts us in the position to consider the points of view of those characters, too. To be sure, some of those characters—namely Joanne's father, Nadine, and even Jimmy—are probably more important to this story than their lack of development in either time frame might be, but the main pair of Joanne and Julia come through strongly. Joanne's rising trepidation about having Julia around becomes clear and inherently melancholy, and Julia's guilt, resentment, and desire for connection take on an almost mythical quality in the way she can see and is terrified by the vision of a little girl from a future that might as well be fate.

These are all big ideas—much more grounded and impactful than the film's excuse of a supernatural premise would seem to suggest. With The Five Devils, Mysius cuts through her own gimmick and arrives at some thoughtful, compassionate truths about how the past defines who we are and haunts us with what could have been.

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