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.
Announcing its hardcore aspirations with a moody steel-blue palette that suffuses the rural setting with dread, the film takes place almost entirely on a remote cow farm, the home of a mixed-race family of three. Thomas (Bastien Bouillon), an affable dairy farmer, is more than happy to let his wife Nora (Herzi), a project manager in a snatched ponytail and white stilettos, wear the pants.
He’s thrown off, however, when Nora loses her cool at the discovery that their young, feisty daughter Ida (Tawba El Gharchi) has posted a video on social media of the trio dancing in the livestock stable. Ida is thrilled with her viral moment — the reel has pulled in over 60,000 viewers — and devastated when her mom forces her to delete it, though for reasons yet unknown to the rest of her family, Nora is too late in stopping its spread. The next day, on Nora’s birthday, a shady gang of brothers arrive to, let’s say, “attend” the surprise party being thrown by Thomas.
Sole neighbor Cristina (Bellucci), an Italian painter and family friend whom Ida routinely checks in with after school, is collateral. The two cronyish younger brothers drive in with the transparently phony excuse that they’ve arrived to check out the real estate, and soon Flo (Paul Hamy) and Bègue (Alane Delhaye) have cornered Cristina and Ida in Cristina’s home, the lack of music and Cristina’s open-studio abode giving their waiting game an eerie undertow. Soon enough, they’re joined by Thomas and oldest brother Franck, the brains of the operation, played by Magimel in a tan suit and semi-transparent shades— less flaming psychopath, more two-bit gangster given his Three Stooges-esque, family-run operation.
Magimel plays Franck with a menacing flamboyance reminiscent of William Hurt in David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence,” which isn’t the only thing “The Birthday Party” shares with that 2005 classic. These plot echoes make Mysius’ French riff look extra-lackluster by comparison, though the slick familiarity of the scenario will make it easy winnings for genre-oriented distributors. It’s a serviceable thriller, in some regards, but Mysius and her cast promise far more than that.
When Nora finally gets home from work, it swiftly becomes clear why she opted for countryside seclusion, and Herzi, with her flinty gaze and pained, whispered delivery, does a formidable job of carrying Nora’s shame with an equal dose of mama-bear rage and defiance. Mysius’ script, adapted from Laurent Mauvignier’s 2020 novel “Histoires de la nuit,” has a hard time delivering the story’s twists and revelations with real heat or suspense, trading out more effective thrills for the noble, but ultimately dreary, desire to see out both sides of the conflict. Franck may have good reasons to be terrorizing Nora’s family, but explaining them away only flattens his character as the titular party plays out like your average hostage scenario, with a few negligible tweaks and flourishes.
In the evening, Nora’s coworkers Estelle (Servanne Ducorps) and Kim (Tatia Tsuladze) arrive, justifying a stretch of awkward play-acting on behalf of Nora and her family. Meanwhile, a parallel (and much more fascinating) intrigue plays out at Cristina’s home, where she’s being watched over by the least intelligent, most unstable of the three brothers, Bègue — a twitchy henchman whose a deficit of brain cells almost makes him putty in the magnetic Cristina’s hands.
The overlap of the two households, which offers an exciting narrative possibility, peters out with predictable cynicisms, while the climax is borderline comedic in its forced symbolism about family bonds. Midway through the film, Bègue monologues about the unknowability of evil or what have you, with the events at Thomas and Nora’s house visualized via abstracted, anonymized impressions of the players there. Whatever mystery is evoked by this unsettling speech goes out the door before too long — by the time the sun rises, we understand far too clearly that there’s little left to feel unsettled by.
