Childish fears take shape in Ogre by Arnaud Malherbe, discovered at the Deauville Festival then at that of Gérardmer. A young teacher played by the vibrant Ana Girardo discovers that the calm life she had hoped for in a small village in the Morvan has some very unpleasant surprises in store for her. A creature roams the forest and it has a particular appetite for small children, like the heroine’s 8-year-old son.
“I was inspired by my own childhood fears in the countryside where I grew up, confides the director to 20 minutes. I think that kind of fantasy-based anxiety is common in kids. I therefore found it interesting to transpose them into the adult world, assuming that the legends start from a reality. The forest and its mysteries are fertile ground for building horrific suspense. The filmmaker, to whom we owe the series Chiefs and Molochno doubt thought of movies like The Wicker Man by Robin Hardy to build a gripping rural suspense.
Fear in the eyes and ears
If we see little of the creature, embodied by Fabien Houssaye, it haunts the viewer’s nightmares for a long time. Starving and furious, she revives the bad dreams of the “big bad wolf” of toddlers. “That’s why I didn’t want to show it too much,” insists Arnaud Malherbe. She had to be scary enough to mark the audience and not present enough to get them used to her”. We do not want to fall under the teeth of the beast and we understand that the villagers respect it to the point of resolving to unacceptable choices.
The deafness of the young hero is also a good way to reinforce fear. Arnaud Malherbe worked on his soundtrack with particular care to share the feelings of the toddler. “The universe of sound is as important as what we see,” he explains. Often, in life, we scare ourselves with what we hear, because we create films in our heads. The growing threat surrounding a heroine with a heavy past is a major asset for a tale that abandons gore in favor of an oppressive atmosphere. Even the support of an understanding doctor played by Samuel Jouy reinforces her isolation and that of an audience identifying with her. Ogre confirms that French genre cinema is doing well.