A retired woman of a certain age (Hélène Vincent), who wants nothing more than to look after her perfect poppet of a grandson (Garlan Erlos), is devastated when her daughter (Ludivine Sagnier) removes access to him, all because of a silly mycological mistake in the delicious, sinister and deadly funny . True to protean form, writer-director François Ozon ( , ) offers with this blackly comic thriller a tonal swerve into naturalism and away from the screwball energy of his last feature, the period-set courtroom caper . Nevertheless, this has a number of Ozonian elements that devotees of the prolific French auteur will cherish: intentional plot holes that keep things spicily ambiguous; characters who appear boringly bourgeois but are hiding secret pasts or proclivities or both; a tiny dash of the supernatural; and an irony in all its forms that runs through everything.
Hardcore Ozon fans will have fun arguing about where exactly this falls in the ranking of his substantial body of work, but it’s surely somewhere in the top 10 or even the top five, a rock-solid demonstration of his control over storytelling, technique and ability to get the best from actors. In fact, just about the only thing you could hold against this is the clunky English translation of the original French title, . Surely or, even better, , sounds so much better, crisper and more evocative, no? Protagonist Michelle (Vincent) is certainly in her autumn years, although she still takes care with her appea.
