Revenge is a dish best served with a side order of cold-blooded fury in Our Father, The Devil, a serious-minded and finely rendered debut feature from sometime actor, producer and shorts director Elli Foumbi. Putting an unusual spin on African immigrant narratives, this slow-burn but absorbing French-language thriller was party inspired by real-life cases of fugitive war criminals reinventing themselves and going undercover in Europe. The work of Foumbi’s father, whose United Nations job involved rehabilitating former child soldiers, also provided some dramatic juice.
Wish-fulfilment fantasy films about female abuse victims turning the tables on their male tormentors is a long-established genre, from I Spit On Your Grave (1978) to Kill Bill (2003) to Promising Young Woman (2020). Foumbi flirts with cathartic, empowering violence but mostly frames these themes in more ethically complex terms, where complicity becomes fuzzy, survivor’s guilt deepens the trauma, and Christian concepts of mercy risk becoming a smokescreen for mass murder.
Our Father, The Devil touches lightly on horror and torture-porn tropes, but at heart it is an anguished morality play in the tradition of Death and the Maiden (1994). Already garlanded with handful of festival prizes, Foumbi’s impressive debut makes its German premiere in Oldenburg this week. More festival mileage should follow, with black female film-makers still a depressingly rare selling point. The story will also likely stir wider interest with its African diaspora backdrop, thriller elements, racial and gender politics.
The troubled anti-heroine of Our Father, The Devil is Marie Cissé (Babetida Sadjo), a refugee from an unnamed Francophone African nation now living a quiet life in a sleepy corner of the French Pyrenees. Marie is a solitary soul who suffers from hidden PTSD, rarely socialising with anybody besides co-worker Nadia (Jennifer Tchiakpe), and repeatedly shunning flirtatious overtures from hunky barman Arnaud (Franck Saurel). All the same, she is popular in her job as a chef and carer at a small-town retirement home, sharing a special bond with elderly resident and fellow foodie Jeanne (Martine Amisse). Indeed, the kindly Jeanne even gifts Marie her cabin in the mountains, allowing her to further escape from human company.
The arrival of an African Catholic priest at the home, Father Patrick (Souleymane Sy Savané), earns a generally warm reception but triggers traumatic memories in Marie. Her initial shock and suspicion eventually erupt into violence when she knocks Patrick unconscious, drives him to her remote cabin and ties him up. Her motive, teasingly revealed by Foumbi, is the priest’s disturbing resemblance to “Sogo”, a notorious warlord who brutalised the young Marie and killed her family decades ago. But this act of righteous revenge is ethically dubious, because Patrick’s chest does not have Sogo’s tell-tale scar, and he insists Marie has mistaken his identity. The police will come looking for him, he warns. “You’re a black immigrant, they don’t care about you,” she replies scornfully.
In fact, the police do begin searching for Patrick, but Marie plays innocent back at work, and never falls under suspicion. While her hostage suffers an increasingly hellish ordeal in his makeshift mountain prison, restrained and alone, she appears to come alive, rediscovering her appetite for sex and company. She seems to be reclaiming the normal human pleasures that Sogo once stole from her, but this rebirth cannot last, the darkness and rage never fully abating. A final bloody reckoning with Patrick becomes inevitable. “You’re not leaving here alive,” she coolly warns him as he begs for mercy, and prays to God for Marie’s own forgiveness.
Anchored in two impressively intense lead performances, Our Father, The Devil walks a careful line between psychological two-hander and brutal revenge thriller, ultimately opting for low-key naturalism over gory melodrama. Foumbi is conscientiously sparing in her depiction of violence, and pointedly avoids flashbacks to the horrors that Marie suffered in Africa. Until the final showdown, she also wisely maintains suspenseful ambiguity about whether Father Patrick really is Sogo, or whether their resemblance is just a feverish by-product of Marie’s deep psychological scars.
Though she is clearly more victim than villain, there are hints of sadistic relish in Marie’s cruel mistreatment of Patrick, which takes on extra weight when her own crushing guilt in this tragic drama is revealed. A tastefully understated score by Gavin Brivik and crisp lensing by Tinx Chan lend a cerebral art-house aura to a story that could have been a roaring rampage of revenge, but which ultimately chooses a more humane path back from the edge of the abyss.
Director, screenwriter: Ellie Foumbi
Cast: Babetida Sadjo, Souleymane Sy Savané, Jennifer Tchiakpe, Franck Saurel, Martine Amisse
Cinematography: Tinx Chan
Editing: Roy Clovis Jr.
Producers: Ellie Foumbi, Joseph Mastantuono
Music: Gavin Brivik
Production companies: Resolve Media (US), Solid Stripe Films (US)
World sales: United Talent Agency, Los Angeles
Venue: Oldenburg International Film Festival
In French
108 minutes
