Like “Funny Games” if it were somehow more pointless, “The Birthday Party,” a rustic home invasion thriller by writer-director Léa Mysius, is a head-scratching letdown considering its cast, a murderer’s row of European stars that includes Hafsia Herzi, Benoît Magimel and Monica Bellucci. It’s the third feature by Mysius and her first time in Cannes competition — a merited upgrade on the basis of her previous films, “Ava” (2017), an irreverent coming-of-ager with a punk-rock sensibility, and “The Five Devils” (2022), a witchy drama about a girl with a supernatural sense of smell. Those films scrambled genre blueprints into dreamy sensory experiences, but little of that renegade energy carries over into Mysius’ latest, an oddly lifeless — and worse, conventional — crime tale about the unearthing of buried secrets.
Announcing its hardcore aspirations with a moody steel-blue palette that suffuses the rural setting with dread, the film takes place almost entirely on a remote cow farm, the home of a mixed-race family of three. Thomas (Bastien Bouillon), an affable dairy farmer, is more than happy to let his wife Nora (Herzi), a project manager in a snatched ponytail and white stilettos, wear the pants.
