This alluring and sneakily emotional film is never confusing...

| May 15, 2023

The... director is more ambitious than she is successful this time around.

| Apr 1, 2023

If The Five Devils more bravely embraced a single perspective, that might have better bound together its depiction of a family splitting apart.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 30, 2023

The film’s magical realism heightens its otherwise conventional contours and sharpens its otherworldly pleasures.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 29, 2023

A surfeit of storytelling ambition is the only thing that threatens to upend this otherwise startling second feature from the French director Léa Mysius.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 27, 2023

With a killer soundtrack, formal confidence, and strong performances, the film invites the audience to embrace the narrative’s chewiness.

| Mar 26, 2023

[The film] loses its edge, building towards an overly sentimental, saccharine ending – but there’s more than enough witchy intrigue, interesting filmmaking and an array of strong performances to keep you compelled.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 24, 2023

[Mysius] creates a sustained, mysterious mood and some striking visuals, which consistently make [The Five Devils] watchable.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 24, 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...

| Mar 23, 2023

For good or ill, I can imagine M Night Shyamalan wanting to remake it for Hollywood. But somehow it doesn’t all come together, delivering neither the stab of actual fear nor the satisfaction of real, plausible psychological insight.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 21, 2023

Mysius is really out there doing her own bizarre thing, and more power to her.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 21, 2023

The film is a thorny exploration of how individuals’ personal ordeals can quickly merge into an impenetrable thicket of irreparable relationships.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 2, 2023

The Five Devils seek to expose the truth while covering topics that manage to make sincere, magical realist cinema with a message that the things we want will come to us, but only when we’re ready.

| Jun 10, 2022

Despite the chaos of the mixed genres and the strange narrative, The Five Devils still has standout moments. Dramé is exquisite as the precocious Vicky.

| May 27, 2022

An intriguing yet overstuffed tale of family mystery and fantasy.

| May 23, 2022

Rather than enhancing the intrigue, the genre components wind up diluting it, and when the two sides of the movie ultimately come together, the impact feels blunted.

| May 23, 2022