Who By Fire (2024) ‘MIFF’ Movie Review: Terrifically Absorbing Slicing Through of Strained Dynamics and Male Ego

In “Who By Fire,” Philippe Lesage excels in slowly drumming up intense disquiet that shakes up a group of people, even if it centrally pivots on the conflict between former filmmaking collaborators and good friends. Albert (Paul Ahmarani), a screenwriter, takes his children, Max (Antoine Marchand-Gagnon) and Aliocha (Aurelia Arandi-Longpre), with him to pay a visit to his friend, Blake (Arieh Worthalter), a prominent director who is said to have won an Oscar. Max’s best friend, Jeff ( Noah Parker), also accompanies them on his insistence.

What undoes some of the film’s power is a squandered opportunity to truly render a big, rich, luxuriant ensemble piece that endows all its characters with individual and collective energy. While it does display such leanings, it backtracks to swivel mainly to a few select characters and dismisses critical chances to expand on later additions to the group. Watching Irene Jacob wasted in a mostly thankless role is particularly baffling. Playing a not-so-removed iteration of herself, she is introduced in the film as an actress who did iconic work in the nineties. But there’s awful little she does. Her character’s presence is more like wallpaper. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around this.

In fact, the film is so chiefly interested and wholly taken in by its excoriating examination of specifically male interpersonal equations, and the shifts therein women don’t fare well in the folds of the tale. In the three charged centerpiece dinner scenes, the dynamics that are put under the scanner largely restrict themselves to the seething barbs thrown by one man against the other. Ego clashes gather force and remonstration at the table. The rest of the folks might as well be blotted out, and the clash between Albert and Blake wouldn’t be dented in shape or effect.

However, parenting and the question of children/family are admittedly posited as the locus point where the row between the two especially gains its edge. That’s the final straw, compelling one to lash out against the other for taking things too far and hitting a raw, personal nerve. The first dinner scene is the longest. There are a lot of still, long takes in the film. In this scene, when everyone assembles for the first time, and a chance to revisit the past is flung at them, the camera stays unmoving, assuming a pose of cool detachment while the situation gradually climbs to the eruption point.

The friends are gently asked why they no longer work together. One tries to pass the baton of explanation to the other. This doesn’t pan out well. Albert, presently working as a screenwriter for a TV animated series, immediately seizes on the disdain and judgment hurled by a sneering Blake, who doesn’t fail to remind him how he rallied against television in his classes in the past.

Isn’t this aspect of being stuck in the past precisely what Blake is so critical of? Albert hits back. It doesn’t elude Albert that Blake is convinced he has compromised on his artistic principles and sold out to the market and mindless factory produce just so that he is able to fund his Aliocha’s education. If he had waited and hung around with Blake as the latter shifted entirely to the far less financially rewarding field of documentaries, how would he have provided his kids with what they might need or desire? The friction between the two is explosively rendered in the glorious, nasty, and sharp-edged exchange between Ahmarani and Worthalter.

However, Aliocha never quite rises above being looked at as an object of desire, which incites deep envy. Inadvertently, she catalyzes this stew of hot, intense emotions in men around her across the age bracket. Depending on your tolerance for the overly familiar type of peculiar prerogative boys think they wield over girls, Jeff will fall on the scale between attracting a modicum of pity and pure exasperation. I firmly belonged to the latter. It also becomes tiresome to endure Jeff after a point.

I get that it was intended, but I think the film doesn’t exactly enhance its width of perspective by adamantly returning to Jeff and his silent, unexpressed writhing. How much can you endure a guy beating himself up over being unable to adequately muster the courage and smarts to make a girl he likes see how deeply he is besotted with her? He even slaps her, insisting she doesn’t care for him and is least interested in him.

“Who by Fire” has a brilliant simmering quality. But it truly breaks through in its strange, feverish, and disconcerting final stretches as tensions skyrocket and bitterness is unleashed. There’s retribution sought, the fractious interplay between adults and children, and peculiar, highly accented dream sequences reflecting fear and the heady psychosis that accumulates in the tense setting.

Who By Fire is screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival 2024.

Who By Fire (2024) Movie Links: IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Wikipedia, Letterboxd
The Cast of Who By Fire (2024) Movie: Noah Parker, Aurelia Arandi-Longpré
Who By Fire (2024) Movie Runtime: 2h 41m, Genre: Drama

Where to watch Who By Fire