Audacity, excess, thrills mixed with laughter… The Origin of Evil, with Laure Calamy, surrounded by a beautiful cast, arrives at the cinema this Wednesday. This is the 3rd feature film by Sébastien Marnier (Irreproachable, L’Heure de la sortie).
What is it about ?
In a luxurious villa by the sea, a modest young woman finds a strange family: an unknown and very rich father, his whimsical wife, his daughter, an ambitious businesswoman, a rebellious teenager and a disturbing servant. Someone is lying. Between suspicions and lies, mystery sets in and evil spreads…
With Laure Calamy, Doria Tillier, Dominique Blanc, Jacques Weber, Suzanne Clément, Céleste Brunnquell, Véronique Ruggia Saura…
Audacity, excess, chills and laughter… Get ready to discover The Origin of Evil!
There are unclassifiable films and The Origin of Evil is one of them: at the crossroads of thriller, genre film, satire and fable, Sébastien Marnier’s new film is a bit of all that. As with Irréprochable, his first feature film with Marina Foïs and Joséphine Japy, the filmmaker manages to constantly surprise us, with a scenario rich in surprises, and by provoking laughter when we least expect it, and by creating dread in an equally unexpected way.
“Everything the film tells is terribly terrible and I wanted, all the same, for it to go through humor, acerbic, nasty, dark… Whatever you want!summarizes Sébastien Marnier, screenwriter and director of The Origin of Evil, at our microphone. We developed that even more during filming.”he adds.
“I absolutely did not want the film to be realistic. We are really in something totally baroque. The Origin of Evil also tells the end of a world. We could allow ourselves all the excesses…” “There is something extremely funny in the horror it gives us”adds Laure Calamy.
Family, money and the end of patriarchy
“The title The Origin of Evil arrived quite quickly, because I could put a lot of things in it, . The origin of evil is first of all the family. But it’s also money, which is omnipresent in the film, and all the violence caused by questions of money. It’s also very clearly the idea of the end of the patriarchy, that all of this could be linked to that.“
And to add:And then, gradually, we came to the fact that surely what made the DNA of a family and of all these characters could be lies. If there’s one thing all families have in common, it’s still that. All the secrets that we will discover over the course of a lifetime, with all the cataclysms that it can cause. This particular family, colorful, toxic to the last degree and quite monstrous, has a lot of lies. The way these characters live the family is based on lies, so that’s more the origin of evil.“
Laurent Champoussin Laure Calamy in The Origin of Evil
The Origin of Evil pays particular attention to the artistic direction, whether it be the costumes, the sets (the huge house and its decoration are characters from the film), without forgetting the music, entrusted to Pierre Lapointe, which evolves with the atmosphere of the film. “Spectators have to be entertained. Give real cinema films to see in theaters, and that these films are not ready-made paths, launches Sébastien Marnier. “We have desires and maybe unconsciously, we build things in reaction to the world around us. The very idea that we can’t sum up the film by saying whether it’s a thriller, a social comedy or a fable… Just that, it’s interesting to escape clichés and boxes. We want in this film, whatever it says, to have fun, and so do we by making it.”
The Origin of Evil by Sébastien Marnier is in theaters this Wednesday, October 5.