For my money, Laure Calamy is France’s most versatile film star, a winning presence in anything from high comedy to realist drama.

Of late, she’s delightfully anarchic in the breezy Two Tickets to Greece (which opens in Australian cinemas in December), scintillating in Eric Gravel’s tense slice-of-life drama A Plein Temps (released in 2021 and very much worth seeking out) and vividly funny in the French TV series Call My Agent!

Laure Calamy, The Origin of Evil. Photo supplied

Here, in Sébastien Marnier’s identity theft thriller The Origins of Evil, she’s brilliant again, this time playing Stéphane, a fish cannery worker who tracks down her absent father Serge (Jacques Weber), a wealthy but ailing restaurateur and hotel magnate who had an unacknowledged affair with her mother decades ago.

Stéphane is stuck in struggle street (her girlfriend is currently languishing in jail) but she doesn’t appear to be gold-digging. Her desire to forge a sense of family seems far more urgent than her need for cash. But when she travels to Serge’s chateau for the first time, her father’s high-maintenance wife Louise, business-focused daughter George, and watchful long-time maid Agnes are suspicious.

Are they...