What goes round principally simply goes round, goes round, and goes round as soon as extra in “Karma,” a typically engrossing however indulgently drawn-out affair given the veneer of luxurious trash by all-in performances from Marion Cotillard and Dénis Menochet. Directed by Guillaume Canet with the identical compulsive style gloss he delivered to the worldwide hit “Tell No One” a full 20 years in the past, this fusion of solemn psychological thriller and ripely ludicrous melodrama boasts a lurid, grabby premise — opening on the puzzling case of a kid’s disappearance in Spain that ultimately leads throughout the border to a cultishly secretive, positively incestuous commune in southwest France. The storytelling, nonetheless, is padded and repetitive, that means this 149-minute film by no means fairly takes escapist flight, whereas additionally remaining laborious to take altogether significantly.
Premiering out of competitors at this yr’s Cannes Film Festival, “Karma” ought to do wholesome home-turf enterprise when it opens this October in France — the place, because the final movie made by nationwide golden couple Canet and Cotillard previous to their 2025 separation, it carries an extra tabloid-level curiosity issue. Internationally, nonetheless, the movie’s distribution prospects relaxation largely on Cotillard, additionally burdened with the heaviest dramatic lifting to do because the stricken, unworldly protagonist who bridges the movie’s two improbably related realms.
Wild-eyed in a register that ranges from dreamy to terrified to shocked into submission, her efficiency is essentially the most truthfully felt factor right here. Menochet, by no means extra menoch-ing because the dastardly commune chief with an unspeakable maintain on our heroine, is in an altogether broader, pulpier movie than his co-star, although “Karma” clicks when these two sensibilities sporadically converge.
The movie opens on a scene of loved-up, sunset-hour bliss in an remoted Catalonian nation home: From the skin, Benoît Debie’s digicam steadily zooms indoors to seek out Frenchwoman Jeanne (Cotillard) and her silver-fox Argentine companion Daniel (Leonardo Sbaraglia, additionally exhibiting up at Cannes this yr in Almodóvar’s “Bitter Christmas”) sharing a spliff and a gradual dance. Get pleasure from this second of two enticing characters in a cheerful, relaxed state, for it’s the one one which “Karma” has to supply. Quickly sufficient, we sense one thing amiss in Jeanne’s conduct and common demeanor. Usually distracted and anxious, she spends what appears an inordinate period of time together with her adoring six-year-old godson Mateo, to the rising consternation of his dad and mom.
One afternoon, whereas in Jeanne’s care, Mateo all of the sudden vanishes. Her story, that she fell asleep throughout an tour to an area lake and woke to seek out him gone, doesn’t fairly add up, least of all when his blood is discovered on a close-by rock. Nonetheless, it’s laborious to doubt the sincerity of her affection for the child, and when she quickly does a runner too, it’s clear there are bigger, darker forces at work on this saga. At the least a kind of is Marc (Menochet), priest and all-round chief on the giant, cloistered non secular group in France that the police encounter of their investigations — the place, it seems, Jeanne lived earlier than her transfer to Spain.
As communes go, it’s much less kumbaya and extra grimly in thrall to at least one galvanizing persona, with Marc dictating the routines and rituals adopted by residents, who vary in age from toddler to aged, and are all to some extent blood-related. Any inbreeding-related disabilities are waved away as “challenges from God” by Marc, who scowls when a cop requested drily in the event that they aren’t overworking God slightly. (Humor is in any other case in brief provide right here.) Menochet, whose bearish side is commonly used to extra tender or conflicted impact, clearly relishes the chance to play a full cuckoo-o’clock villain, however he additionally makes Marc a genuinely scary determine, together with his gradual, heavy-footed physicality, and baleful intent brewing behind a pale, blank-eyed gaze.
As soon as it establishes Marc because the architect of no matter evil is afoot right here, nonetheless, the movie takes its candy time in continuing — as Daniel, Jeanne and the cops (not almost curious sufficient about this Gallic Jonestown settlement turning up of their enquiries, however no matter) all chip away on the thriller from totally different ends, to totally different ends, whereas turning up a lot of the identical more and more apparent info.
A tauter B-movie mindset would serve “Karma” nicely, however regardless of the nasty extremities of his and co-writer Simon Jacquet’s premise, Canet is chasing status right here too — obscuring the movie’s extra visceral mission behind ponderous musings on trauma and religious corruption, the handsomely autumnal, permanent-gloaming murk of Debie’s pictures and the plangent organ strains of Yodelice’s doomy rating. Cotillard, not less than, lends proceedings an air of gruelingly hard-earned anguish, however the movie is finally about too little — with not a lot real-world social or philosophical that means to be taken from its portrait of maximum, eccentric mass dysfunction — to justify its sprawl.
