Asked of its audience in Sheitan’s opening shot, “You ready?” Having already seen the French film, I can answer for you: No, you are most assuredly not ready. You have no idea what’s in store for you, but the next title card may provide a solid hint: “Lord, don’t forgive them, for they know what they do.”
“They” are the gaggle of vaguely young and utterly obnoxious friends who spend the evening of Dec. 23 clubbing and tripping balls. Horniness gets the better of them, which must be why they agree to go the remote country home of the alluring Eve (Roxane Mesquida, Rubber), whom they just met. Initially, it appears the guys have only three items of concern: hangovers, goats blocking the dirt road and competing for Eve’s attention and affections, which is to say her vagina.
But then they meet Joseph, the home’s caretaker. Played by Vincent Cassel (Brotherhood of the Wolf), he possesses overly boisterous hospitality, yet casual racism, a shit-eating grin, a wavering dedication to hygiene and hairpin shifts in mood. His behavior immediately strikes the kids as off-center, to put it mildly. After that, director and co-writer Kim Chapiron (Smart Ass) makes sure to erase “mildly” from his film’s vocab. As Joseph’s true nature is revealed, things escalate on the thermometer of wrongness with the speed of a steroid-ridden rabbit. We would expect nothing less, considering the home’s living room is adjacent to a workshop filled floor-to-ceiling with plastic doll parts.
Sheitan (the title translates to “Satan”) is something of an eye-opener on multiple levels, starting with Cassel. Those of us used to seeing him as wiry and stature-short in his American films (e.g. Black Swan and Ocean’s Twelve) will be taken aback by how burly he appears here, yet his commanding presence isn’t all physical. Cassel embodies a master class on malevolence that penetrates the viewer’s psyche in order to fuck with it for the film’s increasingly anxious entirety, right down to a shocking subliminal frame that interrupts the roll of ending credits.
Ultimately more disturbing than scary, Sheitan toys with you with a calculated menace. Chapiron and company are shrewd enough to front-load the film with laughs so that you’re caught off-guard by the whiplash turns they take. The humor continues, but grows tonally to match the darkness of a rotting lung, making you question if all the sick bastards truly reside on one side of your TV screen. —Rod Lott