Monica Bellucci gives her best performance in years — or at least the one most likely to travel outside of her native France — in Léa Mysius‘ tense, superbly directed, yet narratively predictable third feature, the thriller “The Birthday Party.”

Adapting a popular French novel by author Laurent Mauvignier, the film centers on NGO worker Nora (Hafsia Herzi, also the filmmaker behind 2025 Cannes Best Actress winner “The Little Sister”), whose surprise birthday party turns into hell on Earth when ghouls and goons from the past show up at her farmhouse. But most memorably, the Bellucci plays a lonely, melancholy artist living on the farm whose role holds the key to the movie’s (however narrow) emotional strengths.

The grotesque stuffing of a hen, a flat tire, the sound of a piñata popping off like gunfire, a door closing on its own — the early scenes of Mysius’ third movie after “Ava” and “The Five Devils” fill the frame with visual information that puts the viewer in a state of deep unease. Nora is up for a promotion at her job as an executive tasked with revitalizing rural France’s image as a place people where should want to live. She lives with her husband, the stealthily alcoholic Thomas (Bastien Bouillon), and small daughter, Ida (Tawba El Gharchi), on the isolated farm left to Thomas by his family.

He’s planning, through funds borrowed that only seem to be adding increasingly to an alarming hidden debt, a surprise party to celebrate her birthday. But their relationship is strained; Nora is disinterested in sex with him, and he fixates on a tattoo of a rose on her sleeping body that seems to hearken to some secret past life. Hell, even on the way to pick up supplies for the party, he passes by prostitute row, looking leeringly, before eventually backing up his car and giving in.

There’s a space between him and his wife, and it’s a space that’s about to be blown open when her past is brought into the present. As foreshadowing, Nora is disproportionately upset about a social media video Ida posted that’s gone viral, which shows Nora and Thomas and their child dancing for the camera on the farm. What is Nora hiding?

The video has obviously gone up some dark chain almost immediately, as on the day of the planned party, Cristina (Bellucci, who is again, fantastic here) is accosted by a fleet of strangers: Franck (an oily, sinister Benoit Magimel), Flo (Paul Hamy), and Begue (Alane Delhaye, who has a raffish Franz Rogowski vibe). They’re styled with the cliches of any gangsters or loan sharks, but the reasons they’re here are much worse than money. Ida comes home from school to find the concrete slab of a guest house occupied by Cristina, with whom the little girl is especially close, empty, and Cristina’s dog missing (you know how this part of the story ends).

Eventually, the trio of men ensnares everyone in this family into their trap, their demands unveiling over a claustrophobic feature-length as various tables and allegiances are turned back and forth. Thomas thinks these are potential thugs he owes money to, while Nora feigns not to immediately recognize at least one of them, Franck, as someone from a prior life. Someone who, as he tells Thomas, is fresh out of prison. Meanwhile, Cristina is confined to her home under Begue’s watch, but under Bellucci’s canny and spellbinding performance, she manipulates him into revealing vulnerable details about himself — and at one point over a joint and some music, at least until she can get her hands on a box cutter. And then, whoops, everyone forgot Nora’s co-workers were invited to this bash, too.

The best scenes out of “The Birthday Party,” which will remind you of “Speak No Evil” in how frustrating some of these characters’ complicit behaviors and impassive reactions to being emotionally tortured become, feature Bellucci in some form of disarmament toward her captor. Cristina reveals she has a son in the United States that hates her, as well as the nature of her relationship to Thomas and the farm, and how “artists are often bad parents” in ways that have led her to regret her life, now resigned to painting inky-black melancholy canvases that take up half the space of her home.

How the rest of this birthday party of potential family annihilation plays out will register as rote to anyone who’s seen a home invasion thriller like “Funny Games” before. But Mysius is a rigorously attentive filmmaker, obsessed by the small details that make up the frames of a thriller, who I’d love to be served by better material that isn’t such a by-the-numbers thriller.

Cinematographer Paul Guilhaume drenches the film in dark blues and grainy blacks, as deeply unsettling as Cristina’s canvases. The glorious craft can’t hide a story that has little to say that we haven’t already heard, but the production values are thrilling on their own terms. “The Birthday Party” hurtles toward what are announced as twists but feel grindingly inevitable as the weight of Nora’s past (which involves an entirely other life she kept from her husband and daughter) presses on the film’s third act, which veers into terror but lands on more of a shrug than a wow.

But the goods are here, and Mysius is an exacting, exhilarating filmmaker who is more than ready to be leveled up. This is a riveting film, even if you know where it’s going.

Grade: B-

“The Birthday Party” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newsletter In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers.