Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on various players.
I sometimes have a movie on while I’m working. I find more and more, though, that this only really works for me if it’s a movie that I’ve seen a lot. It’s there mostly for background noise more than anything else. There are a few things I can do while watching a movie, though, depending on the movie. Foreign films and anything else that requires that I read subtitles is always going to be a harder sell in that respect. What this means is that I actually watched a large chunk of Sheitan (Satan for the more English-minded) at the gym, on my phone, while on the treadmill. And I learned a lesson; R-rated movies probably aren’t the best choice for public areas.
Bluntly, there’s some nudity and sex in this. Normally, I don’t care that much, but watching the beginnings of a threesome in public isn’t necessarily something that I was comfortable with doing, so it’s something I won’t be repeating in the future. It’s also why the next time I watched a movie in part on the treadmill, it was a silent film, which felt a lot safer in that respect.
I’m honestly not sure what to make of Sheitan. This is listed pretty much everywhere as both a horror film and a comedy, and I am really stretching to see a great deal of comedy in this. Oh, sure, there are some black comedy moments here and some moments of vicious slapstick, but it’s really all just mean-spirited more than anything else. Sheitan feels like an excuse to make the audience uncomfortable with threats involving insanity, and if that was the point of the film, it succeeds.
A group of friends named Bart (Olivier Barthélémy), Thaï (Nico Le Phat Tan), and Ladj (Ladj Ly) are clubbing and decide to visit the farmhouse of Eve (Roxane Mesquida), a woman they’ve just met, when Bart is kicked out of the bar. Going with them is Yasmine (Leïla Bekhti). Once at the farmhouse, they meet Joseph (Vincent Cassel), who seems mildly unhinged and who takes a very strange level of interest in Bart. A trip to a local hot spring results in some minor violence, and things become more upsetting that night when Joseph tells the story of a man who makes a deal with the devil for invulnerability and, once invulnerable, decides to have sex with his own sister, conceiving a child. The story goes on that the devil has told him he must create a gift for the child. It’s also clear that Joseph seems to be talking about himself, and the fact that he has a room full of dolls in various states of disrepair indicates that he might be working on a gift.
This fact is coupled with the reality that over the course of the day, Joseph is collecting bits and pieces of Bart—a lock of hair, a piece from his clothing, etc. And as moments of both violence and sex ramp up, the sense that no one, particularly Bart, are safe, starts to become much more apparent. So, is Bart really in danger? Does Joseph’s pregnant sister/wife exist? And what’s really the deal with all of the dolls?
The reality of the film is that it plays very much like a long, extended joke at the expense of Bart, who really seems to just want to find someone to have sex with. The running joke is that the two women who are with them are interested in other guys—Eve is very much into Thaï and Yasmine is going around with Ladj. The running joke is that his best chance is with Joseph, who seems very much obsessed with what Bart is doing and where Bart is. That’s one real possibility for the story, an elaborate hoax created by Bart’s friends to mess with him. Or there could be something much darker and nastier at play here, and it’s going to take some time to figure out which is the reality.
But, and I can’t stress this enough, that is the entirety of the film. We have what’s going on in Bart’s head (should he be scared? Is Eve actually going to let him join in with her and Thaï?) and the question of how things in Bart’s head actually compare with reality. I suppose a part of that is the manic performance of Vincent Cassel, whose Joseph is terrifying specifically because he is unhinged. There’s no sense of safety around him—he could become murderous or amorous or call it all a joke at any time, and it feels like all of those are equally possible.
And that, essentially is the weakness of the film as well. It doesn’t really go anywhere because it doesn’t really have anywhere to go. It’s hardly essential viewing, and it’s definitely not worth any more than one viewing at most.
Why to watch Sheitan: Vincent Cassel’s unhinged performance.
Why not to watch: It doesn’t seem to really go anywhere.
