SATAN

Paris, Christmas Eve. Four young people meet Eva, a mysterious and intriguing girl, in a nightclub who invites them to spend the night at her villa in the countryside. Eva lives outside Paris, in a large farmhouse, with the eccentric caretaker Joseph and his pregnant wife. Between sex, bizarre encounters, and many puppets, the boys spend Christmas, but danger is lurking and the villagers seem morbidly interested in the guests. Coming from France, its creator is the young Kim Chapiron who directs, writes, and produces it. Its name is “Sheitan,” which, when pronounced correctly, sounds like “Sciatàn,” meaning Satan! “Sheitan” is an excessive, delirious, mad, and constantly over-the-top film; a film on the edge of genres that alternates between lowbrow comedy and pure horror, with such nonchalance as to often be stunning. It all begins like a classic American-style teen comedy, although one can notice from the start a particular care for framing, photography, and editing inventions. It then proceeds on the lines of European social cinema, among young misfits and petty crime, yet always remaining in the territory of linguistic and visual excess. As soon as the boys arrive in the rarefied countryside on the outskirts of Paris, one immediately begins to breathe the atmosphere of survival horror, thanks to the entrance of a bizarre and brilliant Vincent Cassel who enjoys playing a redneck who is constantly over the top and subtly malicious in his courtesy and availability. However, the definitive entry into the horror universe is accomplished with the protagonists' entry into Eve's farmhouse, a decaying building decorated with unsettling puppets and dismembered dolls. “Sheitan” continues alternating the various genres, emphasizing a preference for teen comedy and grotesque horror, between not always appreciable youth clichés, such as drug use and a fixation on sex, and more brutal and unpleasant violence. “Sheitan” adds to the cinematic genre landscape a new clan of crazy and psychotic rednecks, who, in pure 1970s tradition (“The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” docet), feature unpleasant figures with mental illnesses and physical deformities who engage in practices such as incest and bestiality, up to satanism, which gives the film a more properly supernatural horror tone. Chapiron seems to have no qualms about showing horror in all its explicit disgust, without any shame; thus, the film is by no means stingy in staging sex and violence, dispensed in massive and entirely gratuitous doses. The director shows himself to be very much at ease behind the camera, despite being little more than a debutant, supported by excellent virtuoso editing and beautiful photography by Alex Lamarque, which alternates dark tones with psychedelic ones, accompanied by scenes shot outdoors with extreme realism. What can be criticized about “Sheitan” is the uselessness and excessive length of some scenes that, although not slowing down the narrative action, still give the impression of having been inserted to extend the runtime of the film, thus appearing slightly counterproductive for a greater compactness of the work. “Sheitan” is therefore a very particular film, excessive in every component, which will surely leave many viewers stunned, if not utterly disgusted. But at the same time, it is a satisfying film that exploits a theme that has been overdone in recent genre production but told with such originality as to appear almost like a completely new product. The extreme professionalism with which the operation was conducted and the great skill of Cassel do the rest. Trivia. The vampire who appears in the black-and-white film that someone is watching on TV is played by Monica Bellucci, Vincent Cassel's wife. Watch the trailer for SHEITAN