French director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire signs “Black Flies” in Hollywood, a dark and initiatory New York thriller

Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire is releasing his first American film, a hospital thriller, with Sean Penn and Tye Sheridan.

Adapted from the novel 911 by Shannon Burke, inspired by his experience as a New York paramedic, Black Flies is served by the beautiful acting duo formed by Sean Penn and Tye Sheridan. The film will be in theaters on April 3. This thriller was in competition in 2023 at the Cannes festival.

Chaotic opening

Olie Cross (Tye Sheridan) enters the emergency room of a large New York hospital as a novice. He becomes the partner of a hardened emergency worker, Gene Rutkovsky (Sean Penn), with whom he confronts situations of extreme violence. Alternating between victims of gang rivalries, drifting alcoholics and drug addicts, sordid suicides and other violence against women, Cross questions his convictions as an emergency doctor and questions the meaning of his life.

Black Flies opens with a remarkable nocturnal sequence, where a staff of New York ambulances respond to a crime scene in the middle of the street, following a shootout between rival gangs.

The soundtrack saturated with sirens, the arrival of the stretchers in the general stress, the screams, supported by the rise in power of the opening of the Ring by Wagner, on a chaotic montage with electric lights, grips the guts. This technical brilliance, of directing and editing, will never leave film.

Emotional overload

In one sequence, Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire earns his stripes as a talented director. From time to time he will find this dexterity in his art of filming the street, and the tensions between characters thrown into extreme situations. Unfortunately, the praise stops there, due to a scenario that overloads the affects. Even if these emphatic scenes emanate from Shannon Burke’s autobiographical novel, their sequence in the film generates a redundancy which weighs down the dramaturgy. The origins of Cross’s vocation are also heavy and the resolution of the film does not help matters, after three successive endings to finally conclude on a positive note a film which has been one of the darkest so far.

Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire clearly shows the initiatory bond that unites Rutkovsky and Cross, but it is the novice’s confrontation with a second hardened, cynical, provocative and violent ambulance driver played by a hallucinated Michael Pitt, which will take the upper hand. So much so that the two subjects collide without really tangling. The relationship between Cross and his short-lived mistress Nancy (Katherine Waterson) also lacks substance and comes off as a bit of a departure. Finally, Black Flies, is worth more for its technical than emotional qualities, but does not let the viewer down thanks to its brilliant production.

The sheet

Gender : Thriller / Drama
Director: Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire
Actors: Sean Penn, Tye Sheridan, Katherine Waterston, Michael Pitt, Mike Tyson
Country : UNITED STATES
Duration : 2:00
Exit : April 3, 2024
Distributer : Metropolitan FilmExport

Synopsis: Ollie Cross, a young New York paramedic, teams up with Rutkovsky, an experienced emergency doctor. Faced with extreme violence, he discovers the risks of a job which every day shakes his certainties about life… and death.