Tags: blog, film, horror, essential, 2026
Author: KickingK
Date: Sunday February 01st, 2026
Portrait of a Bin on Fire
Celine Sciamma can make a decent claim to be the greatest living film maker. The only other film makers whose work I anticipate as eagerly are Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou. Look back through Celine's back catalogue and it's wall to wall classics. Not just the ones she directs herself but the one's she writes and hands off to other people as well.
Here she co-writes alongside the star of A Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Noemie Merlant, who also directs and stars. Quite frankly I'm not sure who's showing off more.
Set in heat wave stricken Marseilles, three very different friends meet a good looking neighbour and party with him. It all goes horrifyingly wrong.
The Balconettes returns to themes of A Portrait... but whereas that film kept a very firm lid on it's anger, only letting it escape in a long pressurised scream at the very end, this film comes out howling and swinging from the very first shot.
That first shot being an extraordinary, sweeping, one-take crane shot of an entire Marseilles neighbourhood that settles onto a super tight close up of one of the greatest murders ever committed to screen.
After that it goes a little off the rails. A lot off the rails. It pin wheels around between erotic thriller, body horror, feminist revenge, heist job, intimate friendship drama and slapstick comedy. It is ridiculous and knowingly so. It plays with it's ridiculousness, plays with the absurdities of life that put the characters into such ridiculous situations and is absolutely furious about it.
It never lets that fury overwhelm anything though, just uses it as fuel for whatever direction the film is heading in at that particular moment.
It's a difficult film to assess critically because it never settles on one particular genre long enough to be judged along side other similar films. But who cares about assessing a film critically when you're having this much fun, like being on a psychological, philosophical, fairground waltzer. There's nothing else quite like this and that is arguably its greatest strength.
So yet another belter from Celine Sciamma gets tossed on her pile of outright classics. A pile that's beginning to rival the likes of Powell & Pressburger for both depth and breadth.
