An opening shot of a communal shower locker room gives the assumption of a female penitentiary in THE ORIGIN OF EVIL.

Turns out it is the changing room of a fish processing plant which is run like a prison with watchful warders ensuring conveyor belt discipline and security checks.

Here we meet Stéphane, serving a life sentence sorting anchovies, a sort of parallel life to her lover, who is half way through a prison sentence.

Emboldened by her eviction from her rented room, Stéphane decides to reach out to her wealthy, estranged father, who beckons her to visit. Arriving at her father’s exclusive secluded spot, Stéphane discovers the dysfunctional family around him to be a vipers’ nest, all angling for the old man’s inheritance and suspicious of Stéphane’s motives and bona fides.

Soon enough, she finds herself embroiled in devious hidden agendas during a ruthless fight for the family empire in a luxury seaside French villa.

But who, really, is the predator and who’s the prey?

Written and directed by SÉBASTIEN MARNIER, THE ORIGIN OF EVIL begins with a concept of distorted reality, an array of preconceived ideas that through the journey shift and change and morph into a crazy mosaic of misconception.

The clue was there from the get go – a story that starts in a fish factory and gets fishier and fishier as it rolls along.

Laure Calamy is splendid as Stéphane, the naive and sentimental lover whose fantasy forges into felony.

Doria Tillier as the suspicious conniving legitimate daughter of Serge is text book flinty stoniness.

Dominique Blanq channelling Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond is the fey shopaholic wife of Serge.

As Serge, Jaques Weber embodies the crumbling, decrepit patriarch, a symbol of the patriarchy and its dissembling.

Veronique Ruggia Saura almost steals the show as the silver stealing maid, Agnes.

THE ORIGIN OF EVIL – it’s all in the family