Critics reviews

A film filled with quick-witted observations about vanity and delusion (self- and otherwise), Sibyl bracingly concludes with no moral to impart, no character truly redeemed.

Rich in impulsive sensuality and knowing humor, the film captivates even as it stumbles through too many subplots. It’s a tad convoluted but never dull.

Whether psychological drama or sexual farce — and, really, there’s no way to tell — “Sibyl” is a soapy mess.

It’s a comedy of self-discovery, a drama of lingering addiction and a study of how even seemingly conquered traumas can devastatingly reassert themselves.

Triet’s direction is witty, regularly finding clever and disorienting ways to break in and out of scenes while the more predictable developments of the plot take unexpectedly elongated paths.

Triet’s film refuses to endorse any binaries of feminine behaviour: any hard, glaring distinctions between Sibyl the ‘good’ psychoanalyst and Sibyl the ‘bad’ writer; between Sibyl ‘drunk’ and Sibyl ‘sober.’ Instead, it showcases the ‘troubling’ condition of not having a firm answer to the question of where to invest one’s energies, yet also locates vitality in that unresolved and fluctuating state.

Though the structure never convincingly establishes parallels between Sibyl’s blinkered memory of Gabriel and the dubious nature of Margot, Igor, and Mika’s show business ménage à trois, Triet succeeds in drawing out an absurdist humor from the flawed way in which the mind preserves images and ideas of loved ones.

This confident and witty portrait by the French director juggles comic melodrama with wistful arthouse abstraction, erotic nostalgia, neurotic eccentricities, and a genuine undercurrent of warmth.

Unfortunately—or perhaps somewhat fortunately—“Sibyl” plays like a parody of a French movie. Make a checklist of every stereotypical thing you’d find in a French film and you’d hit all your checkmarks. It’s got pretentious dialogue, extensive softcore sex scenes, impulsive, sensual women spinning wildly out of control, stoic yet handsome men, playful, inappropriate music and a loony, comically explosive character straight out of Francis Veber’s playbook.

It’s at its most farcical that Sibyl yields the deepest insights into the film’s characters... The future audience of the film-within-a-film would never know who was really the object of the actress’s gaze, if anyone at all. Here, that most Freudian of metaphors about love, so cinematic in its logic, takes shape: to see the other is to take them for someone else.

The film-within-a-film doesn’t pretend to any verisimilitude; the publishing industry is an unserious joke and even psychiatry is milked mainly for laughs, but Efira is a dominant and compelling presence and Sibyl is frequently funny.

As a thriller about obsession, “Sibyl” isn’t nearly lurid enough to satisfy. It’s a nonsuccess at reveling in the genre’s delicious style... The only space in the movie that registers is Sibyl’s claustrophobic apartment... This domestic space is one of many insights into the protagonist’s inner-workings... But these hints don’t resonate, betrayed by the film’s meandering, tonally unfocused construction.