‘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.
Plus IconBeatrice Loayza
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Like “Funny Games” if it were somehow more pointless, “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.
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