Director Léa Mysius marks her Cannes competition debut with “The Birthday Party,” an atmospheric home invasion thriller adapted from Laurent Mauvignier’s 2023 novel.
Hafsia Herzi stars as a woman who comes home to one hell of a surprise when Benoît Magimel and his two brothers crash her birthday. Also featuring Monica Bellucci and Bastien Bouillon, the film opens on a note of high tension and never lets up.
“I loved the birthday party aspect from the book,” says Mysius. “Despite everything, they still end up having a party. Then suddenly everything accelerates. There’s something very true-to-life about the eruption of violence. You’re having a drink, people are talking, and suddenly they start hitting each other. Everything spirals out of control.”
Alongside her own films, Mysius also co-wrote “Emilia Perez” for Jacques Audiard, “The Stars at Noon” for Claire Denis, and “Ismael’s Ghosts” for Arnaud Desplechin. She plans to continue that work.
Variety spoke with Mysius ahead of her film’s world premiere in Cannes.
When you read a book thinking about an adaptation, what exactly are you looking for?
What really struck me, beyond the story, was Laurent’s style. If I don’t like the style, I don’t really want to adapt. This was also something I never would have dared to write myself, while staying deeply rooted in the French countryside, which I recognized immediately. It felt something between “A History of Violence” and “Festen,” but with a realism that leaned toward genre cinema. I read it in two days and called the producer saying, “I need to make this immediately.”
The book is very atmospheric, and very descriptive. How did you adapt that for the screen?
When I extracted the skeleton of the screenplay, it could have become a fairly cliché American-style home invasion movie. But what’s extraordinary in the book is everything surrounding the characters: the long sentences, the digressions, the flashbacks. Since I wasn’t using flashbacks, we still needed to understand things about them without making the dialogue overly explanatory. The power of cinema compared to literature is really the power of embodiment — one look from an actor is worth a thousand words. So this really became an actors’ film.
What about this project felt different and new?
The confinement. The closed setting. That was really difficult and the most unfamiliar aspect. My films are usually very physical, following bodies moving through space. Here I locked myself in. The challenge became: how do you still film bodies inside a confined space in a way that always feels new? How do you make people travel emotionally and visually while physically trapping them? And how do you move away from strict realism without making something theatrical, because theatrical cinema really isn’t my thing?
In some ways, all of your films about control – so a home-invasion thriller clearly fits that bill.
Absolutely. All these characters ended up in their lives without ever really choosing them — life pushed them into these situations. And over the course of the film they do manage to regain a bit of control, or maybe lose control. But then again, maybe losing control is a way of taking control back. And there’s always the question: shouldn’t we surrender ourselves to something more passionate? But isn’t passion inherently violent?
And that feeds the tension.
Laurent creates tension with his very long sentences, even referencing Zeno’s paradox, the arrow that gets closer but slower. The question was how to translate that into cinema, how to bend and distort space and time. The more we enter the party, the more anxious we become, the more everything distorts. I wanted the viewer to go through that sense of derealisation. The film becomes a sensory experience, something almost atemporal. And when I talk about loss of control, it’s also about pushing the spectator to let go and be carried by the story.
The film is very balanced. The villains are both scary, and oddly sympathetic.
It was very important to me that every character contain both shadow and light — very concretely, they all have things to reproach themselves for, none are morally spotless. That was especially important with the female characters, because in so much writing women are still often given an underlying purity, which I find slightly misogynistic. Everyone has a monstrous side. If you adopt each character’s point of view, they’re all right in their own way. And that’s what’s terrifying too.
You always work closely with your partner, DP Paul Guilhaume, and your sister, production designer Esther Mysius. This film is about a family – and made by one too.
Beyond those two, there’s a crew that’s gradually formed and has really become a family too. Everyone knows each other. That’s both wonderful — because we trust each other — and also a little strange, because there’s something strange that circulates inside families. The fact that Esther is my twin means she knows exactly where all my ideas come from, but she has her own personality so she brings new thing. I create that same kind of family with the actors, staying very close with them for years. And with younger actors it’s even more important, because a shoot is such an intense experience, so I can’t just abandon people after something like that.
Does your process change when writing for filmmakers like Jacques Audiard and Arnaud Desplechin?
No, it’s completely different — I try to absorb their style. With Desplechin I even had to be careful not to write too much like him, especially since the filmmakers themselves are trying not to repeat themselves! The work involves a lot of discussion, understanding their perspective. I write visually and give lots of images — some theirs, some mine — and then they make their own thing out of it, which I’m completely fine with. Imagination is bottomless; the more you write, the more images you create.
What’s coming up next? Will you continue your parallel screenwriter work?
I’m writing a stage piece with Benjamin Millepied that combines dance, theater, and singing, which I find incredibly exciting. I’ll always keep writing for other people, but it has to avoid becoming repetitive and must open up new things creatively. I’m about to start writing a new film, though for me it’s always difficult to begin before I’ve actually shown the current one — the film doesn’t fully exist until it’s been seen.
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