L'Origine du Mal
Melodrama, tragicomedy and thriller flow together in the story of a shy woman who musters the courage to contact her very wealthy biological father.
The story follows Stéphane, a woman in her forties who lives in financial precarity working in a local fish canning factory. When her living situation takes a turn for the worse, she decides to get back in touch with her estranged father, Serge. Stéphane finds that, years after he abandoned her mother following an affair, Serge is an incredibly wealthy man with a massive estate, and is surrounded by women in his life who hate him and try to undermine her.
Stéphane reinvents herself as an entrepreneur in order to impress her new family, and attempts to ingratiate herself with Serge’s wife and stern oldest daughter, who remains deeply suspicious of Stéphane’s motives. As her visits to the estate are extended, Stéphane slowly realizes that Serge may not be the genial patriarch she thought he was, and her own past, one that she thought was locked away, is slowly catching up to her as well.
Aided by tour-de-force performances from the ensemble cast, Marnier expertly combines the dread of psychological horror with the breakneck plot twists and reversals of fortune of high melodrama. L’ORIGINE DU MAL is an exhilarating skewering of the decadent excesses of the aristocratic class and those who aspire to be among them.