The Origin of Evil

Laure Calamy stars in this involving thriller by Sébastien Marnier, playing an outsider tangled in a web of upper-class family malice.

Familiar to TV viewers as anxious PA Noémie in Call My Agent!, Calamy has recently made some bold big-screen moves away from that persona, nowhere more so than in this twisty psychological thriller with hints of Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell. She plays Stéphane, a cannery worker with her own reasons for making contact with a wealthy family.

Despite a prickly reception, she finds herself drawn ever-closer to them in a mutually compromising game. Following his inventive, unsettling School’s Out, writer-director Marnier offers a classy, devious update on the Claude Chabrol tradition of French psychological thrillers, with a superb cast including a pricelessly haughty Dominique Blanc, screen and stage veteran Jacques Weber, and Calamy as (to coin a phrase) you’ve never seen her before.