96 min | NR | March 24, 2023 | MUBI
An eight-year-old girl with a superhuman nose bottles the scents of everyone she loves. One jar smells like her mother. When she opens it, she falls into the past her family spent a decade trying to forget.
Vicky is an eight-year-old girl with a superhuman sense of smell. She collects scents in jars and labels them. One of those scents belongs to her mother, Joanne, a swimming instructor in an isolated French mountain town. When her aunt Julia returns from years away, Vicky catches a scent that pulls her into the past, and the film becomes a story about the secrets a family buried to survive. Léa Mysius builds the mystery around the body, not the mind. The nose remembers what everyone else has agreed to forget.
Sally Dramé plays Vicky with a watchfulness that anchors the whole film. She listens to the world through her nose, and Dramé makes that physical instinct read as a kind of dread. Adèle Exarchopoulos plays Joanne as a woman frozen in a marriage she never wanted, her face flickering whenever Julia enters the room. Swala Emati plays Julia as the disruption the town never forgave, carrying shame and longing in equal measure. Moustapha Mbengue plays Jimmy, the husband caught between his wife and his sister, and he gives the role a weary tenderness. The three adults orbit a past they cannot name, and the children feel the gravity of it.
Mysius and co-writer Paul Guilhaume structure the script so that scent triggers time travel, and the device works because it ties memory to the most primal sense. Guilhaume also shoots the film, and his camera treats the mountain landscape as a sensory field rather than scenery. The cold lake and the snow-lit slopes glow with an unnatural clarity that matches Vicky’s heightened perception. The editing cuts between present and past without warning, dropping Vicky into scenes she should not be able to witness. The sound design pushes the small noises forward, the slosh of water and the crackle of fire, so the audience hears the world the way Vicky smells it.
This is a film that wants to be a coming-of-age story, a queer love tragedy, a small-town race drama, and a supernatural fable at once. Mysius commits to all of them, and the ambition is real. The film is rich with ideas about inheritance and the way a community punishes difference. It also strains under the weight of everything it carries, and some threads resolve faster than they earn. The reach exceeds the grasp, but the reach is the reason to watch.