Under a Bad Star ★★½

Casting their own daughter Anouk Berlier in the role of Malone, the little girl whose perspective on her parents’ abusive relationship is at the family drama’s core, seems at first glance like a bold move by personal partners and professional collaborators Lola Cambourieu and Yann Berlier. On closer inspection, however, it slightly overstresses the director-duo’s emphasis on their own cinematic daring in choosing a harrowing topic and presenting it with borderline voyeuristic excessiveness. This almost fetishistic focus on violence—mostly psychological, though there are acts of physical aggression—and emotional dependency in a romantic relationship undermines the impact of Noëmie Édé-Decugis’s and Hugo Carton’s visceral performances but doesn’t annihilate them. 

And then this isn’t their story, even though Kiki (Noëmie Édé-Decugis) and Alex (Hugo Carton), the toxic couple whose constant battle their 9-year-old daughter has to witness, have more going on between them. The documentarist camera focuses mostly on Malone as a near-silent onlooker. Anouk doesn’t do much acting, and it remains unclear if this is out of passivity or her parents’ direction. She merely stares wide-eyed at the events in front of her, which from a little child’s point of view are likely terrifying. Her gaze serves as a blank space where the viewers might fill in their own emotions and projections. Though highly effective judging from the positive reviews and strong audience reactions Under a Bad Star elicited when premiering at Cannes’ ACID parallel program, this technique also has a whiff of emotional manipulation.

Ironically, a key subject of the sadistic story is parenting from hell. Set over the course of 24 hours, the plot provides few clues about Kiki’s and Alex’s personal backgrounds, how they came to be a couple, if they ever had normal partnerships, and if their existence together has always been like this or if there was at any point some sort of normalcy. From afar, their family life in an unspecific French suburb seems unremarkable. It’s only behind closed doors that Alex reveals his domineering tendencies towards Kiki, who gets some sort of masochistic satisfaction from suffering them. Stating that the mistreated partner is themselves, at least in part, the cause of their abuse is a problematic statement, to say the least. But it’s the uneasy scenario’s almost inevitable conclusion.

If Alex is an utterly hateful figure, all the more in his moments of calculated tenderness, Kiki is almost as insufferable in her own way. She is excruciatingly needy for affection, but even more for attention, even when it is attention in the form of aggression. Though no economic or practical constraints seem to bind her to Alex, she appears completely emotionally dependent on him. She is giddy with excitement when awaiting their encounter and alludes to her own part in their dynamic when defending him. But just when the stagnating narrative seems close to an existential psychological revelation, the directors pull out. They, too, are stuck in this violent cycle, together with the actors with whom they developed the loosely structured scenes. What starts out shocking ultimately becomes frustratingly repetitive. 

In a bizarre way, those two deserve each other. The handheld camera and tight editing, for which the filmmakers also share credit, encroach on bodies and faces, creating a stifling atmosphere of forced intimacy. A sense of claustrophobia and constant nervousness turns the cosmetic space from a protective sphere into a psychopathic pressure cooker as both parents feed the other’s (self-)destructive impulses. But beyond these superficial observations, this raw feature debut and family collaboration says little about domestic violence, childhood trauma, toxic parenting, or the conventionally romanticized cages of a heteronormative monogamous society. Systemic and societal factors in cis male violence against women and children are all but ignored. Just like their child protagonist, all the directors and their camera do is watch, though from a less innocent point of view.