THE STORY – Thomas, Nora, and their daughter Ida, live on a remote marshland, with limited social contact apart from their one neighbor. As they plan a surprise birthday party for Nora, strange disturbances begin to occur.
THE CAST – Hafsia Herzi, Benoît Magimel, Bastien Bouillon, Monica Bellucci & Tawba El Gharchi
THE TEAM – Léa Mysius (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 103 Minutes
Where this year’s Cannes edition has indicated towards mobilizing trends within the French screen-industry; directors liaising with the political mishaps of their previous work (see “Gentle Monster“), war-set biopics deconstructing the Macron administration (See “A Man Of His Time” and “De Gaulle: Résistance”) and single-punchline two handers resisting the gravitational pull of film-industry-as-metaphor analysis (see “Full Phil” and “Le Vertige”) – 2022/23, in response to the timelessness of government ordered lockdown, drew its attention towards time-twisting emotional capriccios, wielding the weight of generational trauma and familial unrest through the nature of smells as substance for chronological permeation (“The Five Devils“), play as a form of escape (“Petite Maman“) and memory as movement (“The Beast“). As is inevitable, filmmakers who adhere to these trends often risk doing too much. Such was the case for Léa Mysius’s “The Five Devils,” the last of her films to sashay the Croisette, which front-loaded this, the instincts of Jacques Rivette, and overly literal prose into a ninety-five-minute bloat. Graduating from Directors Fortnight, Mysius returns to Cannes, in competition this time with “The Birthday Party” which slows down the spinning wheels and gestures towards something leaner; an adaptation. Where “The Five Devils‘” sins are ones of too many cooks in the kitchen, “The Birthday Party” feels like the product of sunk cost; an adaptation by virtue of a licensing purchase at the hands of breezy producers scanning the archives of Dua Lipa’s book club for something lean, mean, but not fulfilling.
Thomas (Bastien Bouillon), Nora (Hafsia Herzi), and their daughter Ida (Tawba El Gharchi) live on a remote marshland, with limited social contact apart from their one neighbor, Cristina (Monica Bellucci). As they plan a surprise birthday party for Nora, strange disturbances begin to occur when a mysterious but powerful ex-con who has been out of jail for a year, named Franck (Benoît Magimel), arrives at the party with a pair of henchmen brothers (Paul Hamy and Alane Delhaye). What he wants lies in Nora’s past, as hidden truths are unearthed, and this seemingly normal family will have to confront their darkest secrets.
Whilst book-to-screen adaptations can often be littered with a miasma of miscommunications between disciplines – A loss of interiority and the backgrounding of environmental detail – it often makes up for it by retracing prose with the benefit of new formal pillars. Its author, Laurent Mauvignier’s style, however, is the reason for the book’s ephemeral success; snaking paragraphs, light on full stops, and flip-flopping between characters’ experiences, once the home invasion plot kicks in, the form finds itself in conversation with the content, insisting on a sense of urgency that is otherwise lost in translation. Mysius instead filters the narrative through the perspectives of its two female protagonists, both mother and daughter.
Nora, the birthday girl, is introduced as a cautious everywoman who, after being shared to TikTok by their daughter Ida, insists that she and her husband “don’t want to be on socials,” in a brief fit of urgent caution expressed after learning the video has over 60,000 views. Much like “The Five Devils” before it, Mysius uses this relationship to scrutinize generational trauma and the sins-of-the-mother device, this time through a home-invasion-themed premise. Deceptively simple, it’s the screenplay’s finer details that evoke a nebulous sense of stress, not Mysius’s direction. Thomas’ (Bastion Bouillon) loans, Christina’s (Monica Bellucci) floundering artistic career, and home invader Bègue’s (Alan Delhaye) crippling mental health all preface an electric animated sequence that dares to push the film’s aspirations further, if only it could maintain that rhythm.
Franck (Benoît Magimel) finds himself at the center of opposition to Nora. The two have a history, the explanation of which lands with a whimper, but Magimel injects the film with the sort of adrenaline it needs whenever he’s on screen. His quiet menace complements the film’s more muted tone and, as such, hews closer to a horror antagonist than a generic thriller goon. The goons of Franck, though, kill the family’s dog before he arrives (be warned in case that sort of reveal troubles you), making it clear early on that these are dangerous men not to be messed with. As more people arrive at the party, the situation becomes more tense, with more variables, as Franck tries to maintain control of the situation to get what he wants while Thomas and Nora desperately search for a safe way out.
The bouncy, intentional prose from the novel, absent from the film proper, resigns the intended what’s-going-to-happen-next suspense to irrelevant fodder. Whilst Mysius’ direction remains mature and her instincts intact – with special attention given to sharpening moods for each room and implicit religious apparel intended to layer the reveals even further – her screenwriting feels stuck in its first draft, uninterested in foregrounding these aesthetic choices as compliments to the narrative. The film at least looks appropriately dark thanks to the shadow-heavy lighting from cinematographer Paul Guilhaume, which becomes especially effective in the final confrontation out in an open field, where the moonlight is the only illumination for the characters.
You know violence is eventually coming despite the formalities, politeness, and attempts to keep things as calm as possible, but in the end, Franck is someone who has forcibly let themselves into someone else’s home, has displayed a clear intent to use violence if necessary, and isn’t going to leave until he gets what he wants. It just takes a long time for the violence to arrive, finally. “The Birthday Party,” in that regard, is more of a slow-burning thriller than an outright thriller from beginning to end, or even something as darkly humorous and eccentric as “Funny Games.” An Oscar nominee for her work on the script of “Emilia Pérez,” this marks Mysius’s third outing as a director and her most assured and commanding work yet, despite pacing and other issues that persist throughout. But there’s one that’s notably the most regrettable of all.
Throughout this year’s Cannes Film Festival, conversations have been had about AI’s involvement in the industry, ranging from a Thierry-led short film program in the Salle Bunuel, Steven Soderbergh’s use of it in his documentary “John Lennon: The Last Interview,” a surprise Nicolas Winding Refn AI-generated Prada commercial starring himself, and industry heavyweights such as Hideo Kojima, and Peter Jackson, exclaiming that it is “just a special effect.” It is this blase attitude to the creative bankruptcy of the technology that should be in conversation with “The Birthday Party’s” own use of it in a scene involving Ida watching a TV show, wherein Nora ushers her to the TV as a distraction, revealing a full-screen takeover of a machine-manufactured anime reminiscent of the post-Ghibli generation trend that hit X in late 2025. Would it have cost that much more to license an episode of “Bluey” instead?
In being responsible for closing out the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, “The Birthday Party” does so whilst maintaining the solemn opinions being ushered towards the In-Competition strand. Mysius’s return to the Croisette may be disappointing. Still, for all “The Birthday Party’s” faults, the benefits of her assured direction, a confident and watchable cast, and further dissection of the film’s signature themes of generational trauma are obfuscated by unignorable flaws that feel hem in any sort of birthday-party-type celebration of the content, closer to the film’s muted aura.
