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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Wendy Ide

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

Laure Calamy, centre, in The Origin of Evil with, clockwise from left, Céleste Brunnquell, Dominique Blanc, Jacques Weber, Doria Tillier and Véronique Ruggia Saura.
The Dumontet clan ‘could give Succession’s Roys a run for their money’: Laure Calamy, centre, in The Origin of Evil with, clockwise from left, Céleste Brunnquell, Dominique Blanc, Jacques Weber, Doria Tillier and Véronique Ruggia Saura. Photograph: undefined Film PR handout

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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