The Strange Case of Jacky Caillou (2023) Film Review

If Lucas Delangle he took his film from a different angle The Curious Case of Jacky Caillou, things would have been completely different. This is one of those times where a premise naturally takes a different direction than the director intended and things work out for the best. It’s not very common because of the risk that Delangle observes at the beginning, but he’s extremely confident in his approach to his story and, most of all, how a character can steal the point and treat the film as his own universe.
You can find different versions of the title online and this is probably the best one. This makes the story a little more mysterious, and in the case of Delangle’s naturalist and grounded fantasy, it doesn’t help to make the final message a little more blunt: faith is a natural element that non-spiritual people tap into at some point in their lives. We appeal to something supernatural, we believe in the power of faith, and we think that the unimaginable will save us from something we can’t quite figure out. There is nothing more human than that, and it should not be strange. The Strange Case of… be The Story of.
But let’s believe for a second.
In The Curious Case of Jacky Caillou, a young wannabe musician lives with his grandmother. He is a healer and people always ask for his help. Their house is more like a waiting room. Jacky doesn’t understand how he does what he does. Are you simply on the other side of the door listening to his method, which involves Christian prayers and… magnetism?
When he dies, Jacky decides to try to heal. The patient is a young woman who arrives home with a very strange spot on her back. He tries what his grandmother tried, and realizes that this is not the usual case of an illness that can be cured by prayer or a hug to the back. I won’t tell you who she really is, but let’s say the animal corpses appearing in the city have something to do with Elsa’s scars.
This Thomas Parigishow. The debut of the young actor is fantastic to say the least. A combination of fear and curiosity is the force that drives the first half of the film. It stumbles a bit with the second one as it becomes predictable and not very interesting. When it’s time to draw conclusions and confirm what’s up with Elsa’s secret, The Curious Case of Jacky Caillou it becomes an application of boring genre rules that initially have almost nothing to do with the emotional approach. Parigi saves the film because her character follows an unpredictable and natural trajectory, but that’s enough to keep the audience excited about what will happen to Elsa and Jacky in the end.
This is important? Not really. Realism is what drives me The Curious Case of Jacky Caillou away from the genre it alludes to when the film reveals its true setting and works until the very end. There are no special effects or great makeup design. Only a poor person tries to cope with a phenomenon that cannot be cured by hand. Faith is key to Jacky’s actions, but it sometimes drives him to do desperate things.