Un jeu d'enfants

Remember The Possessed? In 1961, Jack Clayton filmed that oppressive story about a young unexperienced lady nursing two innocent kids and facing some supernatural appearances. Or was it her that filled all the atmosphere with her own fears and neurastenic obsessions? Tuel, french director, do the same excellent thing with his movie: two little kids trapped in a huge maze-like parisian flat, between a father who is on the edge of madness and a mother who lost a son a few yew years ago and never succeeded to overgo the drama. Are the two intruders at the beginning of the thriller real persons, ghosts from a past tragedy, or just a projection of the mother (excellent Karin Viard)? Despite an end which sounds just too much of a final explanation, Laurent Tuel's movie is a little masterpiece of building anguish without easy effects, and suggesting horror that can hide istelf behind each of the dorrs of the flat. Wonderful. NAturalist fantasy at its best.

This is not a great movie but it's quite a good one with an eerie atmosphere - ideal viewing for the early hours of the morning. I missed the beginning so had to catch up on what it was all about - but I could tell right away that those kids were up to no good. As another reviewer noted, if you're thinking of starting a family then avoid this film - you may be persuaded otherwise! Maybe the denouement doesn't explain much but hey, this is a horror movie. The characters that played Mr & Mme Worms were (I thought) hideous in the extreme & enough to give you nightmares. A quietly creepy and menacing film.

"Un jeu d'enfants", translated as "A Child's Game", is a French horror flick which is clearly inspired by Henry James' classic work "The Turn of the Screw", or perhaps more particularly by "The Innocents", the 1961 classic adaptation of that story.

You know the drill: it's a woman pitted against two kids who may or may not be evil. Or is she just crazy? Well, here the psychological aspects of the story are pretty much gone and we know for a fact there's something supernatural going on here.

Perhaps it's the lack of the psychological angle that kind of neutered the story? You see, I saw this movie on TV ages ago back in the 2000s when it was fairly new, and I never forgot some of the images from it, but I couldn't remember much else. Having just rewatched it I have realised that this was because there was nothing much else to remember about the flick, except to file it away in my brain as another adaptation of James's novella.

The movie has occasionally striking imagery that grab the attention, true, but it doesn't have much of an atmosphere and nor does it say a whole lot about these images. Something that I hadn't seen handled in horror a whole lot, interestingly, is dealt with here: the way the mother, suffering from visions that are making her act crazy, instigates sex with a couple of strange men who immediately take her up on her offer, no questions asked.

The fact that so many people will have sex with a married person with a family without a second thought is disturbing and this movie calls that to mind, but doesn't do anything with it, or any of the other lights it shines on human psychology.

The lights go on, get our attention, and then they go off again. The movie is content to get our attention sporadically and let us lose interest the rest of the time.

And the climax, when the real bad guys finally turn up, is striking only for how ridiculous it is, an anti-climax in the only throughline the movie had: shocking imagery.

Even french critics have regarded this movie as an insignificant movie, I think they were wrong.

The atmosphere was terrific, characters very well interpreted by two excellent actors : Charles Berling & Karin Viard. Without heavy special effects, scenario succeeds to really frighten us.

I was shocked for a while after the last image plays.

I really loved this movie.

Don't look to this if you're expecting a child or if you want to have one :)

In Paris, Marianne (Karin Viard) and Jacques (Charles Berling), and their son Julian (Alexandre Bongibault) and daughter Aude (Camille Vatel) compose a happy upper class French family, living in a huge apartment (for European standards). The children have a baby-sitter, Daphnée (Ludivine Sagnier) and Jacques has just been promoted in his job. The family's life changes when Marianne receives two weird old visitors, the Worms (Pierre Julien and Manuela Gourary). They ask Marianne for permission to visit the apartment, where they live when they were children. Marianne receives a phone call from her husband, and when she returns to the living room, the strange couple was leaving the children's room. From this moment on, the most mysterious and bizarre things happen with Marianne and Jacques, affecting their lives. I liked this very scary French horror movie a lot. It has the same atmosphere of `Stanley Kubrick´s The Shining', the characters are well developed, and the tension increases in an intelligent way. The viewer is never 100% sure whether the mother or the father is getting deranged or the children became evil, until the end of the plot. Unfortunately, there is a great flaw in the script regarding the visit of the Worms: why have they waited so long to come back to the apartment? My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): `Jogos Sinistros' (`Sinister Games')