‘The Birthday Party’ Review: Hafsia Herzi and Benoît Magimel Have a History in Léa Mysius’ Lackluster Home Invasion Thriller
Comparisons to 'A History of Violence' only diminish this Cannes competition entry, a tepid family affair set in rural France, about a trio of baddies who arrive to upend a woman’s hard-won domesticity.
Like “Funny Games” if it were somehow morepointless, “The Birthday Party,” a rustic home invasion thriller by writer-director Léa Mysius, is a head-scratching letdown considering its cast, a murderer’s row of European stars that includes Hafsia Herzi, Benoît Magimel and Monica Bellucci. It’s the third feature by Mysius and her first time in Cannes competition — a merited upgrade on the basis of her previous films, “Ava” (2017), an irreverent coming-of-ager with a punk-rock sensibility, and “The Five Devils” (2022), a witchy drama about a girl with a supernatural sense of smell. Those films scrambled genre blueprints into dreamy sensory experiences, but little of that renegade energy carries over into Mysius’ latest, an oddly lifeless — and worse, conventional — crime tale about the unearthing of buried secrets.
Announcing its hardcore aspirations with a moody steel-blue palette that suffuses the rural setting with dread, the film takes place almost entirely on a remote cow farm, the home of a mixed-race family of three. Thomas (Bastien Bouillon), an affable dairy farmer, is more than happy to let his wife Nora (Herzi), a project manager in a snatched ponytail and white stilettos, wear the pants.
He’s thrown off, however, when Nora loses her cool at the discovery that their young, feisty daughter Ida (Tawba El Gharchi) has posted a video on social media of the trio dancing in the livestock stable. Ida is thrilled with her viral moment — the reel has pulled in over 60,000 viewers — and devastated when her mom forces her to delete it, though for reasons yet unknown to the rest of her family, Nora is too late in stopping its spread. The next day, on Nora’s birthday, a shady gang of brothers arrive to, let’s say, “attend” the surprise party being thrown by Thomas.
Sole neighbor Cristina (Bellucci), an Italian painter and family friend whom Ida routinely checks in with after school, is collateral. The two cronyish younger brothers drive in with the transparently phony excuse that they’ve arrived to check out the real estate, and soon Flo (Paul Hamy) and Bègue (Alane Delhaye) have cornered Cristina and Ida in Cristina’s home, the lack of music and Cristina’s open-studio abode giving their waiting game an eerie undertow. Soon enough, they’re joined by Thomas and oldest brother Franck, the brains of the operation, played by Magimel in a tan suit and semi-transparent shades— less flaming psychopath, more two-bit gangster given his Three Stooges-esque, family-run operation.
Magimel plays Franck with a menacing flamboyance reminiscent of William Hurt in David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence,” which isn’t the only thing “The Birthday Party”
Source: variety.com