The Birthday Party (Histoires de la nuit) | 2026 Cannes Film Festival Review

Bird on a Wire: The Past Haunts the Present in Mysius’ Thriller

For her third feature film, Histoires de la nuit (aka The Birthday Party), writer/director Léa Mysius once again plays with genre conventions, intrigued by characters who have desperately tried to outrun the ravages of a toxic past through a complete overhaul of their identity. Films which have utilized the same title, including the early William Friedkin film penned by Harold Pinter, or even last year’s Willem Dafoe led thriller, find such a titular party to be the stage for deadly or painful confrontation. The original French language title, Histoires de la nuit, more effectively channels the neo-noir motifs Mysius is essentially attempting to deconstruct through deliberate favoring of characterization over narrative, driven by a notable ensemble of actors who are all incredibly well-cast.

Nora (Hafsia Herzi), has been preoccupied at work with spearheading a new project related to rural revitalization of the remote marshland she lives with her husband, Thomas (Bastien Bouillon), a farmer, and their young daughter Ida (Tawba El Gharchi). They live directly across from a wealthy woman named Cristina (Monica Bellucci), an obscure artist who lives off her assets. When Ida posts a video dancing with her mom and dad which gets an unexpectedly high number of views on social media, Nora becomes upset, demanding the video be removed. On Nora’s birthday, where she also learns she has been promoted to being the head of the town planning hub at work, a group of violent men descend upon her home, led by Franck (Benoit Magimel). It appears Nora is actually a woman named Leila. And she has a dark past.

Mysius, who has co-written scripts with several legendary contemporary French filmmakers, including Claire Denis, Arnaud Desplechin, and Jacques Audiard, returns to themes she’s explored before. Her 2022 sophomore film, The Five Devils, also utilizes a figure from the past to catalyze what’s going on in the present with a narrative dependent on supernatural elements. For her script on Audiard’s Emilia Perez (2024), the narrative deals specifically with how a brutal cartel boss must still atone for past sins even after reinventing himself as the person he always desired to be. Hafsia Herzi’s Nora, we eventually learn, has extricated herself from a sordid past, where small tidbits of information suggest she was a trafficker, someone along the lines of a Ghislaine Maxwell.

The Birthday Party bears echoes of classic film noir staples, as well as their cycle of 1990s American remakes. Magimel is enigmatically sinister in the vein of Robert Mitchum in the J. Lee Thompson classic Cape Fear (1962), resurrected by Scorsese and Robert De Niro in 1991. His gang, which includes Paul Hamy as an effective heavy, recalls William Wyler’s The Desperate Hours (1955), remade by Michael Cimino in 1990, where a band of criminals hide out in a wealthy suburban family’s home, terrorizing them in the process. Mysius borrows from all these tropes, and arguably some more, centering Herzi’s Nora as a kind of La Femme Nikita/Point of No Return protagonist whose deadly skills are easily activated.

The scant details we receive about Bastien Bouillon, a farmer who is deeply in debt over his head, suggest something’s not quite right with their intimate lives, solidified by Franck’s pointed mind games as the ‘party’ ensues. Mysius attempts to get us out of the claustrophobic hotbox by paralleling the second hostage situation next door with Monica Bellucci’s cranky artist, attempting to outwit her captor (Alane Delhaye, from Bruno Dumont’s Li’l Quinquin, 2014, now all grown up). Strangely, the film ends up seeming a bit lopsided as we come to empathize with Cristina, the innocent caught up in her neighbor’s web, utilizing her feminine wiles, but seemingly out of practice doing so. Likewise, the tragedy in store for a pair of Nora’s coworkers who unwittingly show up for libations, the threat of the innocent effectively building tension.

The Birthday Party is perhaps familiar to a fault, playing with hoary genre conventions effectively (though arguably not transcendent enough to withstand the expectations associated with competing for a major film festival prize). Still, Mysius (co-writing with Laurent Mauvignier) knows how to write compelling characters, and her ability to squeeze new energies from routine ideas through shifting the perspective can be pleasurable to those willing to look past the conventional hook.

Reviewed on May 22nd at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival (79th edition) – Competition. 114 Mins.

★★★/☆☆☆☆☆