Dance, Dance, Dance: Livid

While Lucie (Chloé Coulloud) waits at the bus stop for the ride to her first day of work, she is pretty much oblivious to her surroundings. The numerous postings about missing children pasted inside the small glassed in space are easily overlooked. She’s not a kid herself, not really. Old enough to drink and to have a boyfriend, old enough to work for a living. Catherine Wilson (Catherine Jacob) is her mentor for this job, though Lucie already has a good sense of what she needs to do. They are caretakers for several elderly clients, delivering medicines, shots, and checking in on their patients. These are folks who cannot take care of themselves, such as the elderly man who keeps asking after his granddaughter or the creepy invalid Mrs. Jessel (Marie-Claude Pietragalla) interred in her bed, connected to an awkwardly large life support system, and utterly unaware of anyone else. The latter case is rich enough to live in her massive, eerie mansion (formerly a dance academy) until the day she dies—and Catherine confides that there may be truth to all those rumors about Jessel having a treasure secreted away in the walls, but who knows?

Lucie’s not afraid of work, but the story sparks some interest. Her boyfriend William (Félix Moati) is afraid of work, he’s a troublemaker and always on the lookout for an easy buck. A treasure in an old woman’s house? No security systems other than old metal shutters on the windows? No guards or family to worry about? He wants a crack at this. His brother Ben (Jérémy Kapone) tags along because of reasons. And in the middle of the night, they head off to the spooky old house for a little treasure hunt. Some places are best avoided . . .

The treasure is not so easy to find, but there is evidence of strangeness in those walls. Things that move around by themselves. Keys for locks they cannot easily find. A room with a strange ballerina figurine, a life sized variation on one of those music boxes. The more they search, the more disappointment they encounter. Then, the house’s secrets open up, eager to swallow new victims. Old Mrs. Jessel vanishes from her bed, not as invalid as they assumed. One by one, the intruders encounter terrors of a bloody variety, and their search for treasure shifts into a search for escape or at least a means of survival. There is a history of horror here, and a supernatural presence in search of its own escape. Flesh is necessary, and Lucie’s is the most desirable . . . Writers/directors Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury play with elements of gothic horror and brutal terror while blending a dark fairy tale with a survival horror film in their 2011 shocker, Livid.

There’s something special about finding a new director with a visual sense or a quirky storytelling sensibility and looking forward to seeing where they go and what they do from a good (or even a problematic but interesting) start. However, the flipside is also true: Sometimes, it is interesting to first encounter certain filmmakers after they are a few movies along, seeing something entertaining and intriguing and then moving back to check out earlier entries in their filmography. With French filmmakers Bustillo and Maury, I first encountered them when Kandisha (2020) hit Shudder. It was an impressively gruesome and moody spin on the sorts of supernatural urban legend brand of horror that has offered fireside ghost story shivers to folks for generations (as well as informing various incarnations of Clive Barker’s “The Forbidden” novella, aka the Candyman films). That was the fifth feature length film in their oeuvre, and it stoked no small interest in seeking out some of their earlier films. Livid was their second feature, dropping on Shudder as part of the French New Terror module of flicks that arrived in March.

French New Terror is not an umbrella I often seek out. Truth be told, the films I’ve seen that fall under that banner have been endurance trials instead of bringing me much joy. I saw the derivative elements of High Tension (2003) as far too intrusive—the film’s plotting leans a little too heavily on Dean Koontz’s Intensity to be mere homage—and Martyrs (2008) is not a film I think highly of. They are both visually impressive, but the stories they tell? Let’s suffice to say they are not my cup of tea. Irreversible (2002) was more overall impressive, in terms of visually, technically, soundtrack and story wise, and yet it is not a movie I can say I enjoy. It’s a movie I highly regard and respect, but the content is a little too hardcore for me . . . So, when Shudder dropped that module, I thought I knew what the movies would be and foolishly assumed, “Hey, I’ll be able to catch up on my Folk Horror or Criterion Channel watching!” Not so. Even someone who’s generally open minded about film can apply blinders and make woefully wrong assumptions. Most of my readers are only human, after all, just like me. That label of French New Terror covers a far broader range than I expected. Kandisha is in there. So too The Advent Calendar (2021). Also, Livid.

But how is Livid as a film?

Actually, it is an intriguing scare flick. Not a seminal film perhaps, but a solid supernatural horror picture. There’s a mythology underplaying the supernatural stuff, which is not explicitly explained. However, we get a sense of what is going on and why, though many questions remain. Enough for a sequel? Probably. Alas, that never materialized.

As a story, we get a slow burn opening, following Lucie’s day job and then her meetup with boyo and his brother. Eventually, the action moves into the house, and we ramp up into scary horror movie regions. It’s not a sudden plummet into horror, but a gentle descent into it. However, the terror material does turn out to be pretty nasty when we get there.

This is fairy tale territory, and that means dark themes, innocence threatened by things with nasty teeth or blades, and an eventual transformation. All of these boxes are checked off by the time we roll the end credits. Some people labor under the misunderstanding that fairy tales are wholesome and nurturing; as watered down and “defanged” as they are in modern dress, this is true, but in their original forms, fairy tales were neither. This film is not wholesome, not nurturing, and not kind to its characters.

One of the interesting touches is the evocation of dueling themes. On one level, this movie is all about mothers and daughters—there are two explicit mother/daughter relationships as well as numerous evocations of relationships between a young women and an older mentor. The lads are almost secondary here (though their parents are also present, the dynamic is not explored), and the piece has something to say about competition, devotion, duty, responsibility, and love—though often the traditional versions of these values is rather perverted.

The mother/daughter stuff is paired against a theme around aging. Unlike a film like Bubba Ho-Tep (2003), there is only a surface level of empathy for those dispossessed due to their age. Instead, the film is thematically closer to what is found in Ti West’s X (2022), the idea that the good die young, leaving old age to the wickedest individuals. Adults are untrustworthy, they abandon their children when needed or abuse when they should nurture. Jessel is nothing less than the witch as hag from many a fairy tale, but she is also a vampiric creature, something that begat an equally vampiric offspring . . . In the world of this film, the young might make bad choices, but real evil belongs only the hearts of the old, with the worst of these being the elderly.

Cinematographer Laurent Barès brings cleverness and craft to the film’s look. The realization of the imagery, the use of brilliant colors and somber ones, the chiaroscuro, the movements of the camera and its stillness, the way the movement within frame is used . . . Magnificent stuff.

On the acting front, Chloé Coulloud’s Lucie is the glue holding this picture together. She’s the heart and soul of the story, and she can maintain the hard exterior and the insecure insides the film needs to keep her fighting for her life and to keep us empathizing with her. No superhero this, and in the finale, her acting is put to the test when Lucie’s personality takes a shift that is wholly unexpected yet needs to remain believable.

Some of the film’s finer performances are actually nonspeaking or few lines roles. The physicality involved in bringing Jessel to life is terrific. Marie-Claude Pietragalla really works with the makeup and the appliances. Her character is stuck in a respirator mask, which is just as eerie to behold as the thing actor Hugh Keays-Byrne would don for Immortan Joe in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). There are numerous ballerina themed specters, I believe these are Danseuse 1 through 3 (Kallia Charon, June Ribièrem Iruabe Azan), which are creepy as hell. And then there’s the living sculpture herself, a hideous cadaver with sealed eyelids that shifts loyalties in the rather twisty final act.

The writers/directors offer little easter eggs for horror afficionados. There’s a certificate from a dance academy in Freiburg, Germany, suggesting a link between the crone in this manor with the evil Helena Markos of Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977). There is a pub owned by William and Ben’s parents called the Slaughtered Lamb, which even features a much faded sign from John Landis’ film An American Werewolf in London (1981). There’s a shot of some kids wearing skull, pumpkin, and witch masks that echo Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982), and William even sings part of the Silver Shamrock radio ad song . . . A number of these little touches add color and linkage to the horror genre’s cinematic history. They seldom intrude on the plot itself, are generally easily overlooked without issue, while adding a wink for those viewers in the know. Some will see this as a little too cute, others will see it as welcoming, and most won’t even notice these touches in the first place.

Livid is a beautifully crafted if somewhat convoluted tale of spirit possession, vampirism, home invasion, and survival/siege horror. The underlying themes of mothers/daughters and aging are intriguing flavor spikes to an already richly seasoned offering, and they lend the film depth and layers one does not often encounter in such films. Bustillo and Maury’s personal visions and influences are right there, and they carry through from this early piece over into more recent offerings. From an image perspective, the movie has few flaws. From a mythological perspective, the screen story’s supernatural elements seem to be far more complex than the directors ae able to encapsulate in a ninety minute picture, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s fun to fill in the blanks and use the old noodle to try and fit what we’re seeing into a larger picture. Livid is a movie that doesn’t offer all the answers we might wish; instead it invites us into a strange scenario, and then switches off the lights and laughs . . .

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Livid is available in international DVD and Blu-ray editions. Also, it has a streaming edition. As I mention in the article, I caught this on Shudder as a part of the New French Terror collection. It might still be there . . .

Writing for “Dance, Dance, Dance: Livid” is copyright © 2022 by Daniel R. Robichaud.

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