OUT OF THIS WORLD **** France 2020 Dir: Marc Fouchard. 96 mins
You do hear of films that stay with you after. The images, the dialogue or for some the gore or a sequence of action. This film is so subtle in terms of the composition, the music and the actors that I can say this one does stay well after. Out Of This World (2020) or Hors du monde as it is known in France is a brilliant blend of character, and image, into a story that has been done before. The Loner who kills because of childhood trauma.
The film opens with the power of images without dialogue in fact Léo doesn’t speak until almost 30 minutes. Léo (Kévin Mischel) is a musician, working as a taxi driver and living out of his car. He composes music in-between driving fares and slaughtering women because it gives him ‘creativity’. The killing soothes his inner anger and frustration with the world. Léo’s world is one that is formulated by the people he drives around. The beginning of the picture shows the conformity of it all when he picks up a man whom he knows the destination already and an older woman who attends films. One fair he picks up a deaf dancer Amélie (Aurélia Poirier) to take her to a practice but Léo returns to her studio to watch her and eventually summons up the courage to talk to her.
Léo and Amélie struggle with communication, but for different reasons. Léo’s music and Amélie’s dancing threaten to bring out the best of them. Both characters are outsiders in the terms now classic new wave cinema of the Sixties.
Out Of This World (2020) features stunning moments, particularly in a decidedly non-glamorous small Dance club where Léo slowly reveals himself through his dancing to the much-astonished crowd. The combination of music and a tour de force movement performance by Kévin Mischel in the role of Léo makes it memorable. This isn’t even the climax as Léo then follows and abducts a female, he spied on in the club to ask about how he should behave on his coming date with Amélie. Truly terrifying interrogation with words and knowing Léo’s explosive tendencies toward women.
Out Of This World (2020) features the best ensemble cast I have seen in a small film. There are no on-screen hangers-on as each person you meet however briefly has their moment, their life outside and more importantly they have the look to fit this world. Kévin Mischel is brilliant in the low-key yet harbouring a cyclone of violence with restoring to playing the cliché. The brutality Léo inflicts seems almost spontaneous yet brutal without being the usual gorefest that can happen in a film of this nature. The deaths are not orchestrated set pieces but real, simple direct and horrific in intensity like Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer (1986). Other reviews talk about difficulty feeling sympathy for Léo well my take is he is not that at all but an outsider machine in need of love that strikes out. There is redeeming quality as some would say his music is a victim just as much as those he kills.
Aurélia Poirier who reminds me of a young Jeanne Moreau as Amélie is the film, emotional anchor, for Léo and someone who can appreciate his music even though she can’t hear it, only feel the beat and tempo. She projects a tender desperate eroticism throughout the film with her movements and especially her eyes which fill the screen. She is vulnerable and desperate in her own way like Léo is only without violence. Her character name Amélie is a homage to the 2001 film and the lead female actor Audrey Tautou.
Pulling both of those performances together is Fouchard’s direction and Pascal Boudet’s musical compositions which combine to deliver a solid, stylistic thriller as only the French can do in their style. The New French Wave work of the Sixties is in evidence by the framing and the exquisite use of background, and foreground action with a colour plate of natural almost dull colours. Even the jump cuts like Jean-Luc Godard and Stanley Kubrick that happen in the frame to jar the audience contrasted with the calmness of wind blowing in trees. British Director David Lean used the ‘wind in the trees’ device as well in Ryan’s Daughter (1970) to cover up the erotic desperation of events that were happening elsewhere. The other dimension of this film is it explores the victims, the family of those killed and the effect sudden death has on people.
So in the tradition of Martyrs (2008), High Tension (2003) and others with hints of Classic New wave and a dash of Giallo you have the wonderful thriller called Out Of This World (2020). Truly a stunner. Let it sink in around you.
Review by Terry Sherwood
OUT OF THIS WORLD is available to Buy or Rent on Amazon Prime Video