It’s all in the olfactory bulb, that cluster of nerve cells linking the nose straight to the brain in a way that connects smell almost directly to memory: And memory is, after all, a kind of time travel. That’s the underpinning of The Five Devils, a supernatural-tinged queer drama from Ava director Léa Mysius. Initially, scent is simply a trigger for 8-year-old Vicky (Dramé), whose sense of smell is both hypersensitive and extremely precise: A veritable preteen bloodhound, she can both locate by odor and identify anything. But that time-traveling element seems to become a little more literal as she seems to fall back into her family’s convoluted psychosexual past.
There’s a kinship to Joachim Trier’s Thelma. Both are stories superficially about a daughter contending with uncanny powers in a naturalistic environment but that really concentrate on what’s happening with the parent. Here it’s Joanne (Exarchopoulos), a high school gymnastics star now teaching aqua aerobics to retirees in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. Vicky’s unusual behavior and clinginess to her mother might simply be explained away by her seemingly emotionally distant father, Jimmy (Mbengue), or the racist harassment she receives for being the only Black child in her school. But then her Aunt Julia (Emati) turns up after a decade in jail, and Vicky’s time slips become flashbacks exposing a tragic family history.
Seemingly edited by about seven minutes since its 2022 festival run, The Five Devils (in the original French, Les cinq diables) brushes up against the idea that Joanne may be the villain here. Repeated acts of selfish cruelty rooted in her own internalized self-hatred make her unlikable in an oddly superficial way. It’s arguably only due to Exarchopoulos’ captivatingly off-putting performance that there’s any response to the wafer-thin characterization, a weakness of the script that touches everyone. Written by Mysius and Paul Guilhaume, it’s heavy-handed and superficial (of course Jimmy becomes a firefighter in response to Julia’s fire-starting), and it never really commits to the idea that this is Vicky’s discovery. The story reverts to the adult’s POV, as if Mysius isn’t prepared to have mature events happen around her child protagonist (as excellently executed in the 2013 adaptation of Henry James’ What Maisie Knew). If The Five Devils more bravely embraced a single perspective, that might have better bound together its depiction of a family splitting apart.
This article appears in March 31 • 2023.
