Review: Two Incredible Performances Galvanize "Our Father, the Devil"

by Cláudio Alves

For those following the awards season as a celebration of cinema rather than just a long trail to the Oscar stage, the Film Independent Spirit Awards can represent a treasure trove of delightful surprises. Last year, no choice caused more shock than one lone nomination for Our Father, the Devil in Best Feature. For most, this directorial debut by Cameroonian filmmaker Ellie Foumbi came out of nowhere. At the time, it was an oft-forgotten title with scant hopes of a commercial release that had been making the festival rounds since 2021, winning some juried prizes along the way. In retrospect, the Spirit nomination did its magic, and now, Our Father, The Devil is enjoying a limited release in American theaters. 

There's reason to rejoice, for Foumbi's film is nothing short of an acting showcase. It contains two of the year's most fascinating performances, a pair of galvanizing turns ready to shake viewers to their core…

Projected big on the silver screen, faces can become monuments, awe-inspiring in their beauty, dauntingly expressive, sometimes even terrifying. Landscapes of flesh and blood, sculpted in bone, they shine a mysterious light with gazing eyes and may beckon as much mystery as identification. It's often in the intersection of those two qualities that the seventh art's most exciting faces thrive, pulling the audience in while making them question what they recognize in themselves. Some of the best directors in film history learned how to harness that power, transforming their projects into temples of adoration to the human visage. 

Consider Bergman's cadre of unforgettable actors, Dreyer's Joan of Arc, the Caravaggio-like mugs of Pasolini's cinema. Remember last year's startling Saint Omer and what bristling confrontation Alice Diop inspired by squaring two closeups, a brief meeting of stares across courtroom drama. While Ellie Foumbi's debut feature doesn't reach such heights, there's plenty to admire, especially when the director trusts her actors to dominate the screen. When that happens, their light blinds, their darkness consumes. They devour us, who watch them plunder the mines of meaning inside every person, fictional or real, monstrous or otherwise.

It all starts in Southern France, along the Pyrenees, where Marie works in a retirement home, thriving in her duties as chef and carer, finding friendship with a kind resident who shares her love for food. However, one senses secrets lurking beneath the surface. As it happens, our (anti)heroine is a survivor of immense horror, an African refugee suffering from PTSD she deftly conceals from those around. Her coworkers seem none the wiser, fooled by the mask of functionality that may makes things easier on a daily basis but also condemns its wearer to solitude. Even in the company of workmates and lovers, Marie is shrouded in self-seclusion. 

Don't suppose she's the picture of a broken woman or some sort of timebomb, ticking away until an explosion. Though Foumbi will capitulate to thriller stylings later on, the genre exercise takes a step back into frank portraiture on these first salvos, when normalcy is established right before it's ruptured. The inciting incident is the arrival of a new Catholic priest to the community, a fellow African immigrant who calls himself Patrick. Our protagonist, however, knows him by another name. In her eyes, he's Sogo, the warlord who killed her family and brutalized the young Marie into becoming a child soldier.

Flashes of terror go forcibly dormant behind the chef's eyes, her shock leading to rigid hostilities before a strike found somewhere between calculation and wild impulse. One night, she knocks the man unconscious and drives him away to a remote mountain cabin gifted to Marie by her resident friend. What was once an underlying tension erupts in geysers of violence, a vicious pas de deux between captor and captive where each proclaims different truths. At an impasse, the situation stretches over days, the woman's compartmentalization taken to the extreme as her appetite for life reawakens.

While revenge may not be balm or catharsis, it seems to heal something profound, only for the cure to be proven superficial down the line. Such tragedy is to be expected, and once the plot's ambiguities are dispelled, Our Father, the Devil shapeshifts into a treatise on forgiveness. This correlates to the director's inspiration in her father's work with survivors from the Rwandan genocide, centering the idea of moving on as the Sisyphean impossibility at the heart of her film. Sadly, the demands of a revenge thriller sometimes get in the way of psychological acuity, the need to satisfy the audience in conflict with the character's complexity. 

Memory is the battleground of Marie and Patrick's struggle, an internal crucible externalized by the need for justice that will never come. Remembrance is hot iron on the skin and the ghost of countries left behind in the pursuit of a new future. Trading spaces, they switch roles, but maybe not. And even though sceneries, natural and man-made, are essential to the story - marks of dislocation away (but not really) from a traumatic past - they're almost incidental when made background to faces like those of Babetida Sadjo and Souleymane Sy Savane. Yes, we return to faces, their greatness a boon and a pressure on the film, maybe even its ultimate salvation. 

Whatever shortcuts the script might take when unraveling Marie, Sadjo never compromises the character's integrity, nor does she allow herself to be inappropriately demonstrative or her narrative arc to be polished smooth by genre precepts. She's forever knotty, prickly, defiant in the face of her devil and the camera. Pitch-perfect, the actress conveys all this inner pandemonium in parallel with make-believe façades – to her coworkers, the police, her assailant made victim, herself. Moreover, even when deadened by rage beyond comprehension, her eyes play a rhapsody of turmoil in counter-melody to Savane's tonal shifts, their performances complementary.

His visceral despair rings cacophonous yet ideal for the picture's portrayal of the priest, a chimeric being in constant transformation to the viewer's eyes. Indeed, the text might not be enough to sustain the idea when the possibility of absolution comes along. It's thus up to the actors to make up for it like miraculous buttresses, keeping the cinematic edifice upright. Without these two, Our Father, the Devil might have succumbed to the flaws of a novice director's outsized ambition, the cumbersome nature of genre models and clichés. With them, the film's required viewing to all those who love the art of acting and wish to peer into the darkest recesses of the human soul.

Don't miss Babetida Sadjo and Souleymane Sy Savane's tremendous work. They deserve standing applause!