Set, for the most part, in just one cell in a French prison, Maléfique has an intensely claustrophobic feel to it. The lead character is Carrère, a white collar criminal doing time for fraud. Sharing the room with him are some very eccentric characters – Marcus, a transvestite muscleman, Paquerette, a retarded young man who grew up living with pigs before eating his infant sister and Lassalle an intellectual driven mad by too much knowledge who murdered his wife at breakfast one morning.
When these odd and decidedly unpleasant characters stumble on a book hidden in one of the walls, written by a serial killer at the start of the twentieth century, things start to get a little weird. For as well as being a serial killer, Danvers, the books author, was also adept in black magic. When they realise that the spells in the book really work they see it as a way to escape their prison, but will it lead them to freedom or to eternal damnation? To call this Hellraiser meets Cube in a French prison would be oversimplifying things but there are certainly elements of those films present. It’s to the writers’ credit that this never feels like a rehash of old ideas.
I’ve never come across any of the cast before but they are uniformly excellent. With such an enclosed environment the interaction of the characters is very much to the fore, and it’s down to the playing of these four actors that the film is so successful. While director Eric Valette cranks up the tension admirably and there are some extremely effective gory set pieces it’s the characters that will stay in your memory.
