The Five Devils
MUBI | Release Date: March 24, 2023 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
68
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 19 Critic Reviews
Positive:
13
Mixed:
6
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The Irish TimesTara BradyMar 24, 2023
Léa Mysius’s accomplished second feature is the time-travelling, olfactory-driven LGBTQ romance and family melodrama you couldn’t possibly have seen coming. Read full review
91
IndieWireSophie Monks KaufmanMay 28, 2022
Some viewers may be frustrated by the opaque way all threads are resolved. To the end, Mysius retains the sense of her film being a glistening and mysterious object, you can watch but can’t touch. Yet this intact mystery flows from themes too vast to ever be rendered fully transparent: young girls are prescient and love is fate. Read full review
83
The Film StageAlistair RyderMar 1, 2023
It’s a deeply transfixing sophomore feature that, beneath genre artifice, tells a much more direct tale of familial bonds than her debut. Overlook the mysterious time-traveling conceit and you’ll find an irresistibly prickly drama about family and generational trauma. Read full review
83
The PlaylistElena LazicMay 28, 2022
The Five Devils feels like the inevitable encounter of indestructible drives, which send sparks flying both when they are satisfied and when they are denied. Read full review
80
EmpireSophie ButcherMar 24, 2023
Adèle Exarchopoulos excels in this dark, elemental drama. A sensory delight that marks Léa Mysius as a filmmaker to get excited about. Read full review
80
Little White LiesDavid JenkinsMar 23, 2023
Audacious as it is, The Five Devils is a remarkably sedate and ominous film which captures the way that the worlds of adults and children harmoniously orbit around one another while always remaining distant, beautiful, unreachable. Read full review
80
Time OutDavid HughesMar 23, 2023
For all its structural ingenuity, The Five Devils is fundamentally a love story, and a surprisingly affecting one, largely due to a captivating central performance from Exarchopoulos, who, a decade after becoming the youngest ever winner of the Palme d’Or (for Blue is the Warmest Colour), gives a performance of such nuance and sophistication, the rest of the adult cast struggles to keep up. Read full review
80
The New York TimesBeatrice LoayzaMar 23, 2023
Smell is perhaps the most opaque of the five human senses; the one that’s hardest to put into words. No wonder it’s key to the uncanny intrigues of the film, part queer love story, part supernatural psychodrama, by the French director Léa Mysius. Read full review
75
Washington PostMichael O'SullivanMar 29, 2023
It has elements of melodrama, of the soap opera even. But the film’s magical realism heightens its otherwise conventional contours and sharpens its otherworldly pleasures. Read full review
75
Original-CinLiam LaceyMar 22, 2023
In the end, there’s insufficient emotional pay-off or psychological insight here to justify the credibility-defying tricks and narrative convolutions. But the kid is adorable and Exarchopoulos, as the hot and cold Joanne, is believable at every moment, in a film more attuned to mood and sensation than literal meaning. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineJake ColeMar 3, 2023
The film is a thorny exploration of how individuals’ personal ordeals can quickly merge into an impenetrable thicket of irreparable relationships. Read full review
70
Los Angeles TimesNoel MurrayMay 12, 2023
The Five Devils saves some of the juiciest revelations for its final act, which can make the comparatively coy first hour feel frustratingly oblique at times. But this alluring and sneakily emotional film is never confusing. Read full review
63
RogerEbert.comChristy LemireMar 24, 2023
French writer/director Léa Mysius concocts a compelling witch’s brew with The Five Devils, but the result doesn’t quite come together with the potency she’d desired. Read full review
60
VarietyPeter DebrugeApr 5, 2023
The “Ava” director is more ambitious than successful this time around. Read full review
60
CineVueChristopher MachellMar 24, 2023
While The Five Devils doesn’t quite have the clarity of vision of her previous picture, its emotion, erotically-charged themes and puzzle-box structure leave much to recommend. Read full review
60
Screen DailyLee MarshallMay 28, 2022
Buoyed by two outstanding performances – from Adèle Exarchopoulos and first-time child actress Sally Dramé – and shot in ravishing 35mm, The Five Devils is a finely-crafted drama-genre hybrid, let down only by the fact that the story is a lot less interesting than the themes it carries. Read full review
50
Austin ChronicleRichard WhittakerMar 29, 2023
If The Five Devils more bravely embraced a single perspective, that might have better bound together its depiction of a family splitting apart. Read full review
50
The Hollywood ReporterJordan MintzerMay 28, 2022
Mysius goes all out here, but her film overshoots its target by a few miles, even if the mise-en-scène is inspired and lead Adèle Exarchopoulos excellent as always. Read full review
40
The GuardianPeter BradshawMar 22, 2023
Somehow it doesn’t all come together, delivering neither the stab of actual fear nor the satisfaction of real, plausible psychological insight. Read full review
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