Review: 'The Five Devils' a Sexy, Elemental Mystery

Fire and water are the elemental touchstones in co-writer/director Léa Mysius' sizzling supernatural fantasy "The Five Devils." From the opening shot – a miasma of flames being watched by a number of young women – to early scenes in which Joanne (Adèle Exarchopoulos) teaches a water aerobics class before heading to a lake for a freezing wintertime dip, wild passions wrestle with cool rationality while a style grounded in realism underpins metaphysical strangeness.

Numerically, the "Five Devils" of the title are hard to parse, unless you want to count all four members of a long-ago love quadrangle – Joanne, her firefighter husband Jimmy (Moustapha Mbengue), Jimmy's troubled sister Julia (Swala Emati), Jimmy's ex – and Joanne's colleague at work – Nadine (Daphné Patakia), as well as Joanne and Jimmy's daughter, Vicky (Sally Dramé), a child of about nine whose preternatural sense of smell could, you'd think, mark her out for greatness as a parfumier some day; but first, she has to get through the agonies of childhood as an oddball who is bullied by mean girls at school who terrorize her and call her "Toilet Brush."

Vicky is fearless about pursuing and blending different aromas. She collects dung in the forest and boils up crows, preserving the scents she captures in a collection of jars. When Julia, newly free from a stint in prison following an act of arson, arrives for a visit – to the consternation of Joanne, and indeed the entire village – Vicky is quick to discover a bottle of uniquely aromatic oil in Julia's possessions... an essence that, with each whiff Vicky dares to take, temporarily sends the child into a strange time warp in which she psychically connects with Joanne in the past. What Vicky discovers through these clairvoyant journeys is a shared past of tangled romantic connections among the four adults, including a passionate lesbian love affair.

All manner of strong emotions are uncorked as Vicky takes drastic actions to prevent certain past events from recurring, while the suspicious townspeople view Julia's presence among them as an unwelcome intrusion that they won't tolerate for long, putting Jimmy's position in the community – and perhaps his marriage – in danger. Meanwhile, Joanne and Vicky slowly come to understand that they find themselves at the crux of what might be a whole new catastrophe in the making.

Cleverly – even diabolically – constructed by Mysius and co-writer Paul Guilhaume, "The Five Devils" plays it stylistically cool while continually turning up the heat. What starts off as a sly, and juicily exaggerated, essay sending up the male fear of women becomes an affirmation of archetypal feminine power that cannot be suppressed.

"The Five Devils" opens in theaters March 24.