Marie Cissé (Babetida Sadjo) is a chef in a rural French nursing home. Her culinary institute mentor is now a resident there, and she’s coaxed Marie, her former star student, into making her private meals. (We learn that Marie has to tone down the seasoning for the buffet, but even so, I suspect these elderly and infirm French still eat better than many of us.) This is, on the surface, a decent life, ruffled only by bursts of crabbiness from a too-demanding boss. Marie likes her coworkers. She has friends. She has a nascent flirtation with a local bartender, and the slightest overt sign of interest from her could easily turn it into more. Her mentor even bequeaths her an idyllic country cottage.
But Marie walks down still streets in a muffled cocoon of screams and gunfire. There’s a brittleness to her, and she can shed it only for a few minutes at a time.
Her horrific past comes back to her anew with the arrival of Father Patrick (Souléymane Sy Savané), a newly assigned priest whose duties bring him into Marie’s orbit. He’s charismatic but serene, an instant hit at the nursing home, and why not? He comes to men and women living with old, lifelong regrets, and he tells them to forgive themselves for the unchangeable past. God would want them to: “We must focus on what is constructive, letting go of mistakes and failures.”
To Marie, the message can only sound self-serving. She recognizes Father Patrick. He’s Sogo, the young warlord who razed her home in Guinea to the ground. Who killed her family. Who raped and tortured her.
Our Father, the Devil makes Marie’s sense of history visceral: it has a physical manifestation in her body, strong enough that her nose bleeds and her knees give out. Sadjo gives a sublimely physical performance here—the rigidity of her face and body, the way each word comes out like she’s trying not to retch … in the early scenes, this is a horror movie, and her body is a haunted house, alternately vitiated and frenzied by its ghost.
“Damn you to hell.”
Our Father, the Devil
“We’ll meet there soon enough.”
Father Patrick comes to her kitchen when she’s all alone. He asks for more ragout—and in the buffet line, earlier, he asked for two pieces of chicken, not the usual one, and no, not that piece, the bigger one. We can see him through Marie’s eyes: a creature of endless, insatiable appetite. He makes one wrong move—a distinctive tic for cooling his food—and she knows, all at once, that he is who she thinks he is. She knocks him out and brings him to the isolated cottage, where—with enough brutality, enough moral certainty, enough time—she can finally have the upper hand.
Director Ellie Foumbi thankfully avoids turning Our Father, the Devil into an endless guessing game for its audience. Another film would make “does Marie have the right man or not?” its central concern and roll around in the ambiguity, but Foumbi knows exactly when to transition from psychological suspense to moral drama. Ultimately, she’s interested in cruelty, complicity, and how her thoroughly compromised characters can possibly bear their pasts and presents. (The cinematography by Tinx Chan does a lot to aid the direction: several of the shots are beautifully set up with the sense that the moral dilemmas are all Gordian knots waiting for a bloody strike. I especially like a sequence towards the end where power, location, and our access to the scene all seamlessly flip multiple times.)
This all feels borne of a real sense of historical horror: what happens when the atrocities are over, but the people who committed them can’t be neatly separated from you? There’s a hideous but compelling intimacy to how Marie holds Sogo—or is he Father Patrick now? Can he ever be? Does he get to be?—captive. He becomes, in a terrifying way, the person who matters most to her, whose presence and pain satisfies her so thoroughly that people say she must be in love. The film pushes all of this as far as it can go, until, with all developments and revelations finally accomplished, it lands in a place where anything it says about memory and forgiveness is far rawer, and far more difficult, than Father Patrick’s early consolations.
Our Father, the Devil is streaming on Hoopla and the Criterion Channel.
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
Lauren James’s ProfileTags for this article
More articles by Lauren James
Anthologized
A little slice of American folklore that feels like it's been here all along.
Streaming Shuffle
You make your royal bed, and you lie in it.
Anthologized
Alone in vast space and timeless infinity: one man in a ghost town.
Streaming Shuffle
A beautiful slice-of-life film that helped make a career.
Department of
Conversation
I got a chance to see this in the theater, and it ended up in my Top 10 of 2023. I found the ending so quietly powerful. That sense of “is forgiveness possible if you don’t also give yourself grace enough to be at peace?” leads into an ending that reminded me of the ending of Fargo. “And here you are, and it’s a beautiful day.” There’s an entire world in the mountains that will never know of Marie’s pain or Sogo’s cruelty. I found comfort in Marie’s choice because it signaled to me that she was ready to let herself move on with her life.
I like the Fargo comparison, wouldn’t have thought of that – also like that movie, the setting here puts a spin on things (though not a comedic one). It’s removed enough from the place where the incident took place – which iirc we only see in flashback – that you could easily see the characters having the opportunity to pretend it has nothing to do with the past. But they can’t and maybe they shouldn’t. Good movie!
I loved the ending too. I usually happily spoil things in these write-ups, but this hit hard enough that I wanted to leave it as a surprise. It has a very hard-earned sense of grace to it, and it’s really moving when she has that agonized confession of her own–“I’ve killed dozens of people!”–as such a cri de coeur; she has to face that one of the reasons she hates him is because he made her someone else’s nightmare, too, and Sadjo plays the guilt over that perfectly. And confessing the most unbearable part lets her finally move on.
What did we watch? (Also please help me with the formatting here, my family is dying.)
The Straight Story – Found this pretty staggering, especially in light of Farnsworth’s terminal illness – this is his last performance, and the crew was apparently in awe of his motivation despite being in extreme physical pain – and the actual story. (As a man without a driver’s license myself, Alvin Straight is clearly a hero, and the characters correctly treat his lawnmower journey with appropriate awe.) Even without the real-life factors, this would still be a beautiful movie and an intense (but never crushing) expression of love for people, cornfields, and the stars. All of the Lynchian quiet without the sheer dread.
Bat Boy: The Musical slime tutorial – If you go on YouTube, a lot of Broadway show rips get uploaded with “slime tutorial” on them as a kind of cheat code. As grainy and frustrating as the visual quality gets (and Patti LuPone’s, uh, concerns), this is good archival work, capturing performances and cues that otherwise might only exist in memory, and it’s cool to see the 2001 Off-Broadway cast doing it’s thing here. They’re great, though I think the score is better than the show in some ways, maybe better at balancing the campy tone. (The sexual assault would probably not be played for laughs nowadays and I’m curious how the more recent revisions turned out.)
What if you were looking for an actual Slime Tutorial and you got a broadway show instead? I’d be pissed! The only way to calm down would be to make slime, but how?!
Look go to Nickelodeon for all your slime needs, I dunno what to tell ya!
Live Music – Swedish indie-punk-pop band Girl Scout, back in town after being one of the highlights of last year’s multi-venue city festival thing. I think I enjoyed them a little better the first time, although maybe I was just a bit too tired to really get into it. Still, they have a lot of good songs and put on a good show, and they had some young fans there who knew every word which is always good to see! Local support that I hadn’t seen before also had some potential, good songs but lacking a bit of character maybe, and the guitarist used too many FX all the time which turned their lead work into mush – something I notice quite a bit, and never quite understand. Use a flanger / phaser / etc. for emphasis on certain sections for sure but blast it through a whole song and I’m out.
(the formatting is (strong) (/strong) with triangular brackets for bold and (em) (/em) for italic, I do not know why this is favoured over nice simple (b) and (i) but such is life)
Woooo live music! And yeah, the shoegaze conundrum of guitar effects. Less mush, more crunch!
Wooooo live Swedes!!
The Leopard Man – An ill thought publicity stunt in a small New Mexico town leaves a leopard – or should we call it a panther? – on the loose and killing young women. But is it really the leopard doing it? The team of director Jacques Tourneur and producer Val Lewton (The Cat People) are back for another suspense thriller with light horror overtones and a lot of wonderful moody moments. I think I am starting to like Dennis O’Keefe (the PR man whose guilt leads him to become an impromptu detective), and while there is a lot that could be done better (like hiring more Latino actors for the roles), the depiction of Hispanic New Mexico is not bad for the time. Also worth noting that, fresh off my viewing of To Live and Die in LA, this is one of Friedkin’s all time favorite movies.
MST3K, “Being from Another Planet” – Another one of those MST films that I’ve seen before and barely remember. Which means some of the jokes are as good as new. Really, despite Crow’s contention that this is the worst movie they’d seen up to this point, it’s not THAT risible. Just dull.
Kojak, “Queen of the (slur for Roma) ” – So on the one hand, the underlying plot is great: a con woman witnesses a bank robbery turned murder, and comes up with a plan to use them to her advantage while doing an end run around Kojak. And Zohra Lampert – a 70s actress with talent and a distinctive beauty – earned her Emmy for this appearance. But the story relies a lot on the stereotype that all Roma are crooks and con artists, and as much as it humanizes Ms. Lampert, it dehumanizes the Roma overall. And guess what, there’s another episode that will do that later in the series.
Frasier. “My Coffee with Niles” – A play in two acts, filmed more or less in real time in the confines of Cafe Nervosa. And also a stellar finale for season one where, yes, Niles and Frasier chat and ponder their lives. Including the crucial questions “is Frasier happy?” and “is Niles in love with Daphne?” If Frasier had lasted one season instead of eleven (not counting the sequel series), it would have ended on the highest note possible.
Problemista – Alejandro, a young man from El Salvador, desperately tries to keep his work visa through a series of degrading cash-only jobs and mostly by working to please Elizabeth, an impossibly eccentric and delusional art critic-turned curator of her cryogenically frozen husband’s paintings. Elizabeth – played by an as-usual magnificent Tilda Swinton – strings Alejandro along through inane tasks with the promise of signing his much needed work visa always just the other side of updating a database on a dead software platform or setting up an exhibition of nothing but paintings of eggs. This is a story about arcane U.S. immigration rules told with a dose of surrealism like you might see in a Boots Riley project. But even more than the labyrinthian immigration process, it’s about the ways you can find yourself compromising reality itself to hang onto that promise of a dream. Not even the dream itself, just the vague promise of the next step to the place where you might get a shot at that dream.
I worked for many years as a film producer with ambitions far beyond the actual projects I had offered to me. I took on many ridiculous assignments to keep up with the bills, always too afraid to turn down the ones far afield of what I really wanted to be doing but still convincing myself that each one was a step toward what I really wanted to do. One of my clients was an aging pedagogue with a very complicated program for teaching children math and vocabulary using some equally ancient and frankly very frightening wooden puppets which she operated and voiced herself. My client’s kindness was not buried quite as far under ego as Elizabeth’s, but she was similarly exacting about her process in nonsensical ways. She insisted on multiple takes if puppet’s stiff maw didn’t flap in time with her precise word exercises and couldn’t wrap her head around assurances that we could tweak the audio in editing. She presented me with a system for teaching phonics thousands of pages long, representing decades of busy work reproducing and digitizing text. We worked together for months and I, a native speaker of the language with an English degree, could never make heads or tails of the system and could not imagine a child navigating it, even if they weren’t scared away by a series of Annabelle-like cursed dolls shouting the syllables at them.
Did I point out my misgivings about the value of this interminable project, or did I opt out once it became clear that this was only taking time away from things that might actually lead in a direction I wanted to go? No. Like Alejandro, I only saw it fulfilling a need directly in front of me (money) and felt some kind of misguided loyalty to a person who couldn’t explain what they were doing and got irritated if you pushed back (and who also had money). She paid on time (usually) and in full (minus a generous bulk-rate discount). So I subjected myself to multiple surreal afternoons of figuring out the logistics of camera moves that made no sense to me but were somehow essential and infuriated my crew who were another step divided from the reward and reasoning but still subjected to the high-handed headaches doled out by our client who had paid for the privilege of us treating her like John Ford meets Shari Lewis.
Anyway, there’s some hilarious recognition in seeing Alejandro’s situation coupled with some wish-fulfillment in the way he responds when the system finally spits him out. Julio Torres is a great straight man to the madness and Swinton perfectly embodies a woman who blusters past her obvious insecurities, with The RZA as the husband in flashbacks, and you see how she’s attracted to (even as she abuses) the few people who give her nonsense a little patience. This is one of my favorites of the year with lots of jokes and details in the margins. I mentioned Boots Riley for visual cues, but the deadpan absurdity also echoes the best of Spike Jonze. New York has been depicted many different ways, but I don’t know that I’ve seen it as a place with heaps of marvelous artwork on every curb waiting for trash pickup.
One of A24’s annual poorly-marketed treasures, highly recommended.
You are making me recall a guy of a similar nature who I took on a writing assignment for 25 years ago, I ultimately quit a month or so in. Not the wrong call but that “misguided loyalty” was there and I wanted to snuff it out. Anyway, this is a great write-up, I’ll keep an eye out for this.
On my list already but good writeup.
Foreign Correspondent (1940)
Is this Hitchcock’s funniest movie? It’s certainly funnier than any of his comedies that I’ve seen. It’s interesting to look at this and Rebecca and see how much of Hitch’s first forays into America were still so very British. I watched a Criterion bonus feature about William Cameron Menzies, who did the special effects work here. Menzies was the first person in Hollywood to be credited as Production Designer (for his work on Gone With the Wind), and his work here is great. The matte painting work is phenomenal. I would have never guessed, tbh. I am surprised by how much I really liked this one, given how it’s barely talked about among Hitch’s works.
Need to see this one! I love Hitchcock’s sense of humour.
Hitchcock’s humor in movies: Hilariously dark! What a delightful sicko! Hitchcick’s humor in real life: You should be arrested immediately.
Crossing Delancey – when you want slimy Eurotrash yoy get Jeroen Krabbé, when you want sharp Bronx Jewishness you get Peter Reigert, Joan Micklin Silver knows what she’s doing here. But the dudes are locii for Amy Irving and her orbit is NYC, which Silver films with an eye toward diverse people and places that is not forced, just life for a young woman trying to figure out what she wants and why she might want it. She is very good and willing to be unsympathetic but Reizl Bozyk as her Bubbe steals the movie, and the film is generous enough to allow such joyful thievery. Good stuff, on Criterion.
There was a time when I would travel to New York City with some regularity, but it still exists for me *mostly* as an exotic location visited in film (or Seinfeld). Anyway, I would find myself driving on Delancey and that more than anything would collapse my two versions of New York into one.
Hacks, Season Three, Episode Six, “Par For The Course”
It’s amazing how focused Deb is on her goals; the moment she has nothing to gain, she entirely stops playing up to men. She comes off as a deeply emotional person, even when you do get to know her, but it ends up falling into this hyperrationality. I’m also genuinely amused at the reveal that Ava has never held a ‘real’ job – admittedly, it does make sense that her ideals are entirely abstractions to her with little practical basis.
Christina Hendricks! Domming Ava is literally the funny thing she could be doing here. It’s insane how they made a lesbian sex scene involving one of the sexiest American women incredibly funny.
Christopher Macdonald quipping “On stolen land?” killed me.
The Ava-Hendricks scene is so hilarious. I’d say it’s quotable, but only in the sense that I keep wanting to yell Ava’s best line from it sans context and then sadly having to resist, lest I give people the wrong impression.
I really like what the show does with Marty. It’s a great Christopher Macdonald performance, too–he could easily have been the shallow heel and nothing but an early antagonist, but he’s an actual character with both real humor of his own and some surprisingly poignant moments.
“Ultimately, she’s interested in cruelty, complicity, and how her thoroughly compromised characters can possibly bear their pasts and presents.”
At the risk of Boss Babying contemporary African immigrant stories, this sounds a bit similar to His House. Which was very good, so this is on the list.
Agreed! I also like taking this classical situation – what if you met your former tormentor? – and applying it to contemporary life. Stories are always taking on new forms and whatnot.
It’s like the revenge-pic version instead of that one’s haunted house take.