‘The Birthday Party’ Cannes Review: Monica Bellucci Shines In An Otherwise Undercooked Home-Invasion Exercise

Nora (Hafsia Herzi) is in for one hell of a celebration in The Birthday Party, a tense but painfully obvious home-invasion thriller that plays like a streaming-friendly mashup of A History of Violence and Funny Games updated for the social media age. Director Léa Mysius — of The Five Devils fame — shows genuine flair for staging, but she’s nowhere near the genuinely uncomfortable territory that her spiritual mentors David Cronenberg and Michael Haneke staked out in those films and others. What she’s made instead is a leaner, blunter machine, one more interested in impact and suspense than in anything particularly beneath the surface.

Better suited to a Midnight Screenings slot than main competition, Histoires de la nuit — its rather different French title — opens by introducing Nora and her family: husband Thomas (Bastien Bouillon), who works the fields surrounding their home, and their young daughter Ida (Tawba El Gharchi), all of them living in a lovely rural property. The film’s first scene has Nora furious after Ida posts a video of the three of them dancing that promptly goes viral. The girl deletes it, but sulks about it for the rest of the day.

The next morning, Nora’s colleagues throw her a birthday celebration at the office — where she also learns she’s been promoted, to the barely concealed irritation of two colleagues who apparently had their eyes on the same spot. Those workplace tensions are quickly sidelined, though, as Mysius pivots back to the countryside and lingers awhile with Cristina (Monica Bellucci, the film’s undisputed highlight), a melancholic artist and neighbor who spends a good deal of time with young Ida while her parents are away.

Into this arrives a car carrying a man claiming to want to buy a house for sale nearby, but Cristina takes an immediate dislike to his manner and his looks and turns him away. Her instincts were sound: the man, a certain Flo (Paul Hamy), has shown up with his brother Bègue (Alane Delhaye) and intentions that are, to put it mildly, not great. After killing the girl’s dog and taking Thomas and everyone else hostage, a picture begins to form — one that is, paradoxically, anything but clear.

The arrival of Franck (the reliably excellent Benoît Magimel, slumming it as a fairly generic villain), the older brother and apparent ringleader, who enters the house with the sole purpose of waiting for Nora — whom he insists on calling Leila — opens the film’s central question. And that question is more or less exactly what it looks like. Nora arrives, finds the hostage situation in full swing, and flatly denies being who Franck says she is. She’s not Leila. She has nothing to do with this man’s past. But does she? Or are there buried histories that neither her husband nor her daughter know anything about?

The Birthday Party constructs that premise and then proceeds to stretch it across two hours without generating much in the way of revelation or genuine intrigue. What it offers instead is a rotation of power plays, fleeting tensions, shifting allegiances — Ida proving particularly susceptible to whatever she overhears — and a fair amount of drinking, which gradually wears everyone’s patience thin. Meanwhile, Bègue is left behind at Cristina’s place, where she sets about manipulating and seducing him in hopes of helping her imprisoned neighbors. The fragile ex-convict seems like easy prey. And she is, after all, Monica Bellucci.

Nothing that follows lands with any particular force, surprises, or lingers. There are a couple of showy jolts, a handful of screenplay decisions that strain credulity, and a persistent fog surrounding what actually happened in the past or what the invaders are even after — kidnapping? Murder? Intimidation? Some uncomfortable truth? Or simply rattling everyone’s nerves, on screen and off? By the time the birthday party wraps up, things look very different from how they started. The characters, however, remain exactly as opaque as they were at the beginning.