The Origin of Evil review – Laure Calamy shines in enjoyably pulpy, Highsmith-esque thriller

The Origin of Evil review – Laure Calamy shines in enjoyably pulpy, Highsmith-esque thriller

Arriving on a jetset Mediterranean island to meet the wealthy father she has never known, Calamy’s factory worker enters a vipers’ nest of hostility in Sébastian Marnier’s devious French psychodrama

The root of all evil? Money, naturellement. Stacks of it, poured into a lavish villa on the French Mediterranean island of Porquerolles and frittered away in a unilateral war waged by a bored, ignored shopaholic wife against her overbearing husband. But even €1,500 a day squandered on everything from designer handbags to taxidermied endangered species to shopping channel tat fails to make much of a dent in the wealth of the Dumontet family, a clan that could give Succession’s Roys a run for their money in toxicity, treachery and obscene riches.

Into this nest of Lanvin-clad vipers stumbles Stéphane (Call My Agent!’s Laure Calamy), a pleasant, seemingly unremarkable youngish woman who works at an anchovy-packing factory and, without a place of her own, sofa-surfs in the apartments of her long-suffering friends. And so the scene is set for Sébastian Marnier’s enjoyably pulpy, devious, Highsmith-esque thriller in which nothing and nobody are quite what they seem.

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