THE BALCONETTES - Mark Reviews Movies

The Balconettes, The Forge

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 21, 2025

The spirit of co-writer/director Noémie Merlant's The Balconettes feels right, as a trio of women deal with the assorted flaws and much-worse actions of several men. The scenario here, from Merlant and co-screenwriter Céline Sciamma, establishes such terrible things happening to and around these women that there's pretty much nothing they could do that would be worse.

In a way, there's a freedom in that, in terms of both the story itself and the main takeaway of Merlant's movie. When people are wronged so much, it's satisfying to watch them try to set things right, even if they have to do things that are, by pretty much any objective standard, wrong in order to do so.

This is mostly to explain that and why the movie works best as a dark comedy that revolves around a dead body. It's fine, though. The person that inhabited that body probably deserves as much as, if not worse than, the handling the corpse receives here.

What's strange about the movie, however, is that a comedic approach, as unapologetically dark as it may be, comes across the wrong way in terms of the tone. This is still terrible, heinous stuff with which the story is dealing, and to turn the consequences and the aftermath of those deeds into a string of jokes feels oddly frivolous. It's tough to laugh when we know there's a lot of pain beneath these characters' desperate, ultimately righteous acts.

Merlant does establish that sense of desperation right from the start for everyone and everything within this story. For one thing, it's a hot summer day in Marseille. Emotions and tensions are as high as the temperature, and after the camera scans across a pair of apartment buildings to catch glimpses of people trying to stay cool in the heat, the scene finds a balcony on the fourth floor of the second building.

A woman (played by Nadège Beausson-Diagne) is asleep or unconscious on the ground there, and her husband tries to wake her with his voice, his foot, and a splash of water. Her face and body are covered in cuts and bruises, obviously caused by the husband who doesn't hide his desire to make more of them. Before he can, the wife hits him in the back of the head with a handheld shovel and suffocates him with a towel.

His isn't the aforementioned corpse, by the way, but her response to his death and her killing of him pretty much defines the movie's central conceit. She goes to a neighbor, claiming her husband fell and hit his head, to call the police, because the woman is scared she won't be able to hide her happiness over the phone. The joy of this sort of freedom overshadows any horror or fear that might come from what it takes to achieve it, basically.

The dead body of note comes later, as friends Nicole (Sanra Codreanu), Ruby (Souheila Yacoub), and Elise (Merlant) meet to spend time together at Nicole's apartment. She's a writer, currently working on her first novel, which is a fictionalized version of her infatuation with a guy in the neighboring apartment building. Ruby is an online sex performer, and Elise is an actress, whose marriage to the always-calling Paul (Christopher Montenez) makes this little getaway even more fun for her.

It is all fun, really, as the women talk, gossip, drink, tease Nicole about her crush on Magnani (Lucas Bravo) across the way, and escape all of the pressures on them. Magnani even invites them over to his place, since Elise accidentally hit his car while trying to park and Ruby went downstairs to do damage control. He seems nice enough, but after Ruby decides to stay alone with him, she rushes back to Nicole's apartment, covered in blood and in shock.

That's because the neighbor is dead, and he is because Ruby was defending herself against sexual assault. None of that is funny, and obviously, Merlant doesn't try to play as such in any way. What is amusing is how that corpse essentially becomes a prop for several scenes of the trio trying to move it, hide it, and figure out what to do with it, lest their friend is accused of a crime, even though she was the victim of the dead man.

The rest of the movie, though, feels as if it is in constant debate with itself. It raises absurd situations and conceits, especially the fact that Nicole starts seeing and being pestered by the ghosts of horrible men, but the filmmakers also attempt to seriously confront what Magnani did, what another man will later do, and how those acts of sexual violence affect our protagonists.

The Balconettes seems like a nearly impossible task to find balance between these very different modes, tones, and concepts. That the movie is occasionally funny and achieves some feeling of empowerment for its characters along the way is a minor accomplishment, even if the entirety of the effort is too muddled to succeed.

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