SHEITAN (2006)

 

(a.k.a. SATAN; director/co-screenwriter: Kim Chapiron. Co-screenwriter: Christian Chapiron.)

Storyline

A group of young scumbags and their female friends, booted out of a disco, hang out with Eve, the beguiling young woman they met there, at her parents’ secluded country home.

Review

SHAITAN (in Hindi and Arabic it means “devil”) is an interesting and often good French-language film, a raunchy and hellish take on Jesus’s birth and the three wisemen (who are turned into unlikeable louts in SHAITAN).

After the three drunk and fiercely heterosexual friends (Thaï, Ladj and Bart) get thrown out of Styxx Club in Paris, they, with their female friends (Yasmine and Jean) take their new friend Eve up on her offer to hang out at her parents’ big, empty country house on Christmas Eve. When they get there, they encounter a bucktoothed, goofy shepherd, Joseph (played with malevolent and hilarious relish by the consistently great Vincent Cassel), who lives and works at Eve’s house. Josephine, Joseph’s reclusive, pregnant sister, also lives there, choosing to hide in her room upon the arrival of the young people, whose male members are odious, especially the idiotic Bart. (Cassel pulls double acting duty in SHAITAN, playing the bucktoothed Josephine with equally hilarious and dark aplomb.)

Revelry, skinny dipping, fights with the locals, and a big dinner follow, with the frustrated, c**k-blocked young men drinking with the flirtatious women and Joseph’s sometimes violent mood swings. As the night progresses, things become more unsettling. Joseph tells a leering, devilish tale of sister-brother incest and shows special interest in Bart, who’s trying to act tough but fails miserably. Not only that, the rooms with the dolls and their spare parts─Eve’s absent parents are dollmakers─increase the creepiness.

The Chapiron-penned and -directed film is a wild, R-rated and often homoerotic work, between its shifting tones, moods and camerawork (EVIL DEAD-esque extreme close-ups, odd angles, etc.). Some of the middle section scenes could have easily been excised, but their purpose, it seems, is to flesh SHAITAN out to its required ninety-minute length.

When midnight, December twenty-fifth, strikes, everything comes together. Mysteries and situations are resolved in violent and briefly bloody fashion, capped by an offbeat, beatific finish.  The morality that often drives and structures American films is absent here, aside from the toxic-macho attitude of the three young fools, making SHAITAN a welcome addition to the horror genre.

Make sure you watch the credits.

SHAITAN is not a perfect movie, but it’s entertaining and energetic, with loathsome characters (and great actors). Worth your time, if you’re not uptight about religion, amoral characters and occasional male/female frontal nudity.