Lucas Belvaux presented the world premiere of his latest film, The Haunted Minds [+lee también:
crítica
entrevista: Lucas Belvaux
ficha de la película], adapted from his own novel of the same name, at the Brussels International Film Festival (BRIFF). The film tells the story of a disturbing manhunt that turns into a journey of discovery, beginning as a film noir before venturing into metaphysical reflections on the cost (and taste) of life, and raising questions already explored by the filmmaker on the management of post-traumatic stress.

Cineuropa: How would you describe the film in a few words?
Lucas Belvaux: It's a coming-of-age film, but in reverse. Usually, we follow young people as they lose their illusions. Here, we have adults who discover that life isn't necessarily as bleak as they had previously believed. They go through a kind of epiphany and start living again, having been dead before coming back to life.

Who are your tormented ones, and what are their torments?
There is Madame, an extremely wealthy woman with a painful past, who is passionate about hunting. Overcome by boredom, she decides that she still has one more prey to hunt: a man. Max, her butler and former legionnaire, gets back in touch with one of his old teammates, Skender, now a homeless man, but whom he knows could be the best prey, the most dangerous, the most resilient, especially since, separated from his wife and children, he believes he has nothing left to lose. The three of them will sign a contract for a manhunt.

This manhunt quickly becomes a pretext for focusing on a more internal quest.
All of them have lost their zest for life, crushed by traumas from which they cannot recover, and are forced to assess the cost of life in very literal terms. They are like zombies, devoid of life. They are ready to die, and in the case of Madame and Skender, they even have a possible deadline. It is this deadline, perhaps, that will cause a shockwave.

Opposite this trio is a fourth character who, almost in spite of herself, brings them back to life.
Manon, Skender's ex-wife and the mother of his children, opens a door to other possibilities for him, a passage from darkness to light. She has two children and cannot afford to give in to sadness, so she fights every day.

How did you decide on your casting?
I really wanted to work with Linh-Dan Pham, whom we discovered in Indochine, She is a very unique actress, quite rare, whose mystery I love, and she has a certain versatility, she can quickly switch from a light-hearted mood to deep introspection, which is what I needed for Madame to be both domineering and benevolent. For Max, a very opaque character, I immediately liked Ramzy Bedia's ability to embody tragedy. I find that he carries it within him, a character who accepts his destiny, a kind of block, both mineral and expressive at the same time. Niels Schneider, because I wanted an actor who was sharp as a double-edged blade, who brought real tension, yet was extremely gentle when he was with his children. Finally, Déborah François has what Belgian actors and actresses often have, a way of being in the material, pure acting, without over-intellectualising things, with absolute sincerity.

The film is adapted from your own novel. How did that come about?
When I originally wrote The Haunted Minds, I wanted to write something that was free from the constraints of staging. When you write a screenplay, if it's a historical narrative, a war story, or if there are a lot of characters, it costs significantly more. In a novel, you can do anything. And so, in the end, I wrote a novel set in the present day with three characters and few settings, and I thought it would make a good film, and that there was no reason why someone else should do it!

The Haunted Minds begins as a film noir, only to break free from this form. Can you tell us about your relationship with genre?
The original idea was to make a manhunt film, which is almost a genre in itself. What interests me about the genre is that it provides a framework that can be freely subverted, twisted and broken. Nevertheless, the genre allows ideas to be ‘smuggled’ in, so to speak, to comment on society without appearing to do so.