Lucie (Chloé Coulloud) is starting as a trainee in her new job this morning, where she will be assisting Catherine Wilson (Catherine Jacob) on her rounds as they visit the elderly in and around this quiet French fishing village and administer to their needs. On their first appointment, they go to the apartment of an old man who needs his daily injection, but he is not quite in possession of his faculties; Lucie notes how scared he looks when they enter his home, so volunteers to give him his medication, and manages to calm him. Catherine in turn notes how promising she is - but there's one patient who may prove a problem.
Well, she wouldn't have been if Lucie hadn't blabbed to her boyfriend Will (Félix Moati) and his brother Ben (Jérémy Kapone) that the old woman in question may be in a coma, but she's rich enough to get her wish to live out her dwindling life at home in her rambling mansion. Wait - rich enough? According to Catherine, mentioned apparently in passing, there's a fortune hidden in the house, and Will suddenly gets a glint in his eye when he realises here's the chance to pack in his fisherman job and live the high life on the old woman's cash. If he can find it that is, so along tags Ben and the initially reluctant Lucie as they venture out in the middle of the night to rob from someone who doesn't really need her money anymore.
It should be pointed out this is taking place on Halloween, which should offer some idea of how directors and writers Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury were aiming for a more traditional selection of scares, in the vein of a fairy tale for adults. Adults who didn't mind a lot of the red stuff getting spilled, but then if you'd seen their previous outing into horror Inside that was much as you'd expect. What you might not anticipate was how long they took to get to the gore, and when it arrived how wrapped up in conjuring a weirdly magical tone which not everyone in the audience was going to go along with. Often Livid was described as a bit silly, frankly, but if you wanted something different for what was a twee vampire flick at heart, this might intrigue.
If you can imagine a twee vampire flick that nevertheless poured on the blood with gay abandon, then that's what you had cooked up here by the French frighteners, with its preoccupation with ballet dancing little girls mixed up among slightly impenetrable business regarding the transference of souls. Lucie, in spite of accompanying her boyfriend to the would-be robbery, isn't a bad sort at all as we've seen established at the beginning, so is a plucky heroine whose empathy allows her further on into the plot a form of psychic power, handy for filling in the gaps in flashbacks to explain precisely what it is the villains want from her and her hapless companions. Even then, this was so wrapped up in its own little world that you could be forgiven for losing interest.
Yet it was refreshing to see a couple of filmmakers who had made plain their hopes for revitalising the horror genre not go a more obvious route with, say, some deadening woman locked in a basement thriller or yet another zombie movie. They may not have entirely succeeded with this, but they gave it a game old try, and if there were points where they gave into expectations - it's never a promising sign when the heroine is tied to a table top, because usually someone else has to save her - there were plenty more indications they were going their own merry way in piling on the weirdness. If Tim Burton were French and more in love with stage blood and Grand Guignol then you would have some notion of what watching Livid was like, as life size musical box ballerinas alternated with throats getting ripped out while the trio get trapped in the mansion and some kind of experiment has to be carried out with souls. The happy ending was certainly something different. Music by Raphael Gesqua.
