The Successor: a thriller as captivating as it is destabilizing (review)
New film from Xavier Legrand after the triumphant Up to the Guard, this thriller about the post-mortem toxicity of a father manages to paralyze with irregularity.
Cinematic coup de force which won the César for best film and stunned with its description of patriarchal influence and family violence, To the hilt had set the bar of expectations high around Xavier Legrand. The talented director returns with a second feature film which this time shows how patriarchy also exerts brutality on adult men, and not only on women and children.
For this, Legrand very freely adapts a novel by Alexandre Postel, The Ascendant, and tells the story of the young and anguished artistic director of a French haute couture house who has long since cut ties with his native Quebec. But the sudden death of his father forces our hero to urgently return to Quebec to take care of the estate. He will then make a terrible discovery about his father and sink into a dangerous spiral of secrets. Once again adopting the psychological thriller genre, the filmmaker succeeds in a captivating first part where the fashion designer played by Marc-André Grondin experiences the return to his origins as a stifling chore.
However, when the story openly turns to Greek tragedy and begins to petrify its hero, the desire to film the character’s astonishment at length strangely slows down the tension. Legrand’s direction fortunately enhances the last fifteen minutes, where a powerful emotion grips us to ultimately make this tale of the difficulty of freeing oneself from the weight of fathers terrifying.
