Writers: Mathieu Naert
Director: Stéphen Castang
Everybody’s out to get Vincent and he doesn’t know why. First an intern inexplicably batters him with a laptop, later another colleague stabs him with a pen and soon he’s being chase, punched and all but drowned in slurry. Is it a virus, a kind of mass delusion and is it personal to Vincent? Stéphen Castang and Mathieu Naert’s black comedy, Vincent Must Die screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2023, considers what happens when the red mist descends and the implicit role that violence usually plays in contemporary society by letting it loose.
It is a clever concept, one that builds tension and a nice sense of escalation as the film develops, and director Castang manages the growing scale of his scenario really well. It starts small, an isolated experience of violence in a workplace setting, one that Vincent might have unwittingly instigated with a joke about coffee that reinforces established power dynamics with the office intern. But this it happens again and Castang shows an HR failure to really deal with it, singling Vincent out as the cause of his own attack.
From here, the situation gets very real very quickly, turning Vincent Must Die into a kind of road movie in which the main character travels around the French countryside looking for hideouts and trying to avoid eye contact with others that will provoke their violence. That this proves almost impossible is part of the fun of the film, and Castang revels in the increasingly inventive ways to persecute Vincent while simultaneously moving the story along, upping the stakes and the tension with extremes while giving the audience just enough information to understand why this is happening to a reasonably ordinary man.
All of that is anchored by a strange kind of love story that gives Vincent someone else to engage with meaningfully, so the film becomes more than a series of increasingly horrible encounters. That waitress Margeux is not necessarily immune to Vincent yet adds interest, becoming his hostage, friend, victim and lover at various points of the film. The speed of their connection is perhaps the most unlikely part of Vincent Must Die but it brings an emotional balance that is equally vital to making Vincent sympathetic and giving the audience a human connection to the unfolding carnage.
Karim Leklou plays the dour Vincent with a perplexed survival instinct, in some respects a bemused everyman but also quick thinking and equally prone to retaliatory violence to save himself. Vimala Pons’ Margaux is a cool, likeable co-lead, balancing the periodic need to attack with her changing, confusing and growing feeling for Vincent. Michael Perez is underused as Joachim, a university professor experiencing similar symptoms that could have a greater, comparative role in this story.
Castang’s apocalyptic conclusion is like an inverse La La Land, the happy motorway scene turned into a desolate, intense and brutal place. There is innate violence in all of us, Castang and writer Mathieu Naert are saying, much of it unreasonable and targeted in all the wrong ways. Vincent Must Die is a black comedy with a stark warning to us all.
Vincent Must Die is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2023.
