Thumbing through the press materials accompanying “The Five Devils,” the new film from Léa Mysius, one can’t help but take note of the highbrow sources from which the director took inspiration: among them, James Baldwin, Philip Roth, Ingmar Bergman, Jonathan Franzen, Maya Angelou, the French novelist Pascal Quignard, and the American poet Jim Harrison. At the risk of damning Ms. Mysius with faint praise, let me recommend her supernatural melodrama as something a bit less cultivated — that is to say, the best Stephen King movie that Stephen King had nothing to do with. The French Alps are a long way from the backwoods of Maine, but “The Five Devils” contains all the requisite hallmarks: a child with powers beyond her ken; a family of modest means undergoing immodest difficulties; adolescence painfully recalled; adulthood ruefully accepted; and, if not a happy ending, then a sense of balance restored. Ms. Mysius has crafted a reliable entertainment.It’s a good one as well. The director has taken on a lot in a film with a small cast and an intimate purview. Race relations figure into the story as does gender normativity — at least, I think that’s what it’s called. The director makes a point of her art being involved with “new systems of representation,” “a desire for emancipation,” and “the discourse of stigmatization.” Academic shoptalk has, alas, become the air we breathe.Thank goodness, then, for the bracing climate of the French mountainside, the complications inherent in love, and the ability to travel through time. The latter is a gift — if “gift” is the right word for it — possessed by 10-year-old Vicky (Sally Dramé), the daughter of Joanne (Adèle Exarchopoulos from “Blue is the Warmest Color”) and Jimmy (Moustapha Mbengue). Mom is a former beauty queen who teaches swimming at a local recreation center; dad is an immigrant from Senegal who works as a fireman. They adore Vicky. How Joanne and Jimmy feel about each other is less settled.Vicky also has an incisive sense of smell. Early on in “The Five Devils,” we see her with a collection of jars, each of which is labeled with the scent of a specific person or event. Later, out in the woods, Joanne blindfolds Vicky and challenges her sense of smell to impressive and, from mom’s vantage point, disconcerting effect. However much Joanne tries to obscure her own scent, Vicky — well, she sniffs it out.Life up in the Alps seems idyllic, until we see mom, dad, and daughter huddled in front of the television. The body language is disconsolate: All is not well in paradis. Things get worse when Jimmy gets up to answer the phone; his estranged sister Julia (Swala Emati) is coming to visit. Joanne’s reaction to the news is sharp. Clearly, there’s personal history of a rather unpleasant sort coming to the fore.A wary Julia shows up with a blackened eye from being on a drunk. Curious about the aunt whom she’s never met, Vicky rifles through her things while the grown-ups are busy. Among them is a small bottle that, when smelled, causes Vicky to instantaneously black out. Yet it does allow her to wander through the time of her mother’s adolescence. It is within these flashbacks that Vicky realizes there’s more to the relationship between Joanne and Julia than has been made known to her. She also learns something pivotal about Nadine (Daphné Patakia), mom’s disfigured co-worker at the gym.Ms. Mysius’s film benefits from its relative quietude, a factor that puts it distinctly to the side of the typical genre film. Mood and mystery are emphasized over jump-scares — though there are moments that are genuinely startling. And while Ms. Exarchopoulos is the putative star of the film, it is the irresistible Ms. Dramé, in her debut role, who runs away with the picture. With eyes borrowed from El Greco and an expansive shock of hair, she carries herself with a mien that is well beyond her years. Ms. Dramé brings the right amount of buoyancy to a film that would be poorer without it.
