Juan Buñuel's Au rendez-vous de la mort joyeuse | Expulsion of the Devil (1972)

Au rendez-vous de la mort joyeuse is the second film by Jean Buñuel, Luis Buñuel's son, who also co-scripted the screenplay. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to call it a cult film, and it is a highly accomplished poltergeist movie. Marc (Jean-Marc Bory) and Françoise (Françoise Fabian) move into a long-deserted and isolated manor house with their young son and older daughter Sophie (Yasmine Dahm), who is pubescent. And her pubescence is the essential problem here, especially when anything relating to sex matters is concerned: snails mating, her parents indicating their love for one another, etc.

Sophie seems externally to be unaware of the problems she is causing, although they are great. Glasses sway about on a table, the table hurls itself through the window, a moving fridge nearly traps a man, to the extent that a television company offers Marc a considerable sum of money to make an anonymous documentary on the house while the family stays elsehere. And that is where the real destruction begins, with Sophie secretly returning to watch the camera crew. Beretti (Gérard Depardieu) plunges his hand into boiling water, Péron (Jean-Pierre Darras) is visited by Sophie in the night and ends up covered in dirt, the crew's car and van are burned, and Beretti kills the visiting père d'Aval and his young troupe of girls stifle Beretti as he tries to drive the girls from the grounds of the house. It is as though most people within Sophie's circle are bewitched or in some way affected by her. A very strange and fascinating film.