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Pay attention to Marie’s hands in Ellie Foumbi’s spiky directorial debut Our Father, the Devil. They often reveal more about the steely protagonist than her facial expressions. There’s a method to the way she grips a carrot with one hand and cradles a stainless-steel knife in the other. Her movements are swift, precise and rhythmic. She brings a similar energy to cutting a loaf of bread, brandishing a switchblade and cleaving into flesh.

“The human body doesn’t bother me,” Marie, played by an excellent Babetida Sadjo, says to her favorite nursing home resident, Jeanne (Martine Amisse), at the start of the film. Her lips curl into a rare and generous smile. Why does her benign response to a throwaway sentiment about old age spook like a damning confession?

Our Father, the Devil is a cannily constructed study of trauma and a seductive character study. After its...

Like many refugees who have made their home in Europe, Marie (Babetida Sadjo) works in a care home. She provides some direct support for the residents – notably Jeanne (Martine Amisse), her former tutor, who remains a friend – but her primary role is as a chef. It’s a function around which her whole life revolves, a way of being useful and of setting aside the personal. In the opening scene of Ellie Foumbi’s film, before the credits appear, we see her in a montage of shots: her back, her hair, her body below the neck. Only later do we see her face, the person – the survivor – ill at ease in this frame.

There’s a belief which much of society still persists in holding onto, that when a person has survived trauma and no longer faces that threat, they are able to live just like anyone else. Marie is.