It’s difficult to know where to start reviewing a film like Kim Chapiron’s “Sheitan”. In fact, there are no other films quite like it. On paper the rudimentary plot makes it sound just like hundreds of other “horny young guys/girls looking for sex lured to out of the way location where horrible things happen” movies.  What makes it different is the peculiar “frenchness” of it all.

Three loutish lads, Bart, Thai and Ladj, out looking for booze and sex on Christmas Eve, chat up local girls Eve and Yasmine. When they find themselves thrown out of a nightclub (called Club Styxx) they’re invited by Eve to her house in the country. This turns out to be a dilapidated farmhouse close to a village full of the weirdest local yokels since Deliverance. En route they bump into Eve’s demented caretaker Joseph (played by Vincent Cassel with a huge shit-eating grin and a satanic glint in his eye). And then…not much happens for the next hour. Joseph introduces Bart to his nymphomaniac niece Jeanne, takes everyone for a dip in the local hot-springs with the local in-breds where they indulge in a piggy-back fight and Jeanne attempts to give Bart’s dog a hand-job,  Ladj tries to get into Yasmine’s pants while being continually interrupted by calls from his wife,  Bart and Thai try to get Eve interested in a threesome, and Joseph’s wife Marie lurks about doing something sinister with a doll while remaining mostly unseen. All of which sounds vastly more interesting in print than it actually is to watch on screen.

When things start to liven up in the last twenty minutes or so, they do so in such an incomprehensible manner that it’s impossible to work out what the hell is supposed to be going on. It becomes a mess of quick cuts, crazy camera angles, snarling dogs and screaming women.

I was left wondering just what it was I’d spent the last 90 minutes watching. A horror film? There is no tension, no scares and very little gore. A black comedy? Cassel is quite obviously having a lot of fun playing Joseph but I had almost none watching him. Is it some kind of satire on the current state of French youth? If so France is now off my list of places to visit.

Following the recent releases of such films as Alexandre Aja’s Haute Tension,  Géla Babluani’s Tzameti, and David Moreau & Xavier Palud’s Ils, French cinema was becoming the perfect antidote to all the Hollywood produced watered-down rubbish and J-horror remakes. Unfortunately this train wreck of a movie only tarnishes that growing reputation. I hope it’s just a blip.