10/01/24 – 19:30 The Venue
France 2022
Dir: Sébastien Marnier
Cert 15
123 mins
Starring: Laure Calamy, Jacques Weber, Dominique Blanc, Doria Tillier.
Fed up with her dreary life and dead-end job, Stéphane plucks up courage to make contact with Serge, the father she never knew. Stéphane, we are led to believe, is the unacknowledged offspring of a bygone relationship. A meeting is arranged and Stéphane travels to the Mediterranean coast and is taken by Serge, a wealthy retired businessman, to meet the family in their showy, if weird, home. Indeed, showy and weird are epithets that could easily be applied to Serge’s wife (think Bette Davis in Baby Jane mode…) and two daughters. Stéphane does not get a good reception, except from Serge, who, following a stroke, seems to have lost his hold over his family, much to his resentment. However, no-one is as they seem in this powder keg of bitter rivalries. Everyone has a secret to hide, but none more than the enigmatic Stéphane. A thriller that could be the love child of Patricia Highsmith and Claude Chabrol, “The Origin of Evil” is a brilliant, darkly comic study of family dynamics, laced with murder and twists aplenty.
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