Bad Seeds is a 2018 French drama-comedy film written and directed by Kheiron who also plays the lead role, with Catherine Deneuve and André Dussollier in starring roles. It was released on 21 November 2018 in cinemas in France, and on 21 December 2018 on Netflix. The film centers around Waël, a con man whose life is changed when he is forced to work as a mentor for a group of teenagers who face expulsion from school.
Plot
Waël is a petty criminal who lives with his foster mother Monique in a Paris suburb. They make ends meet by conning grocery shoppers out of their purchases outside a supermarket. One day they try to rob Victor, who recognises Monique as an old friend he had not seen for 30 years. He agrees not to press charges provided that Waël and Monique agree to work for him on a volunteer basis, Waël as a mentor for troubled teenagers who have been expelled, and Monique as Thomas's secretary at the youth club he runs. Throughout the film, Waël's background is presented in flashbacks to his childhood: he was born in an unspecified Middle-Eastern country, in a Muslim village. The entire population of the village, including Waël's family, was massacred by Christian and Jewish soldiers when Waël was very small, and he survived by picking pockets in a city until he was accepted into an orphanage run by Christian nuns. He befriended Joseph, a Christian boy whose family had been killed by Muslim soldiers, and who taught him French. After being sexually abused by one of the priests, Joseph committed suicide. Some time later, the orphanage was attacked by Muslim extremists and most of the adults and children were killed; Waël escaped the attack, the second massacre in his life, together with one of the nuns. Waël manages to connect with the recalcitrant teenagers, but they refuse to return to the youth club unless he pays them €10 per day. There are six students in the group: the intelligent and arrogant Nadia, Shana who admires Nadia but has little will of her own, Karim and Ludo who live in neighbouring areas and constantly pick fights with each other, the Romany boy Jimmy who can't read or write and doesn't speak much French, and Fabrice who seems generally disaffected with life. Over the following week, Waël gains their confidence, sometimes by exaggerating his own abilities, or pretending that he has invented important things or coined well-known sayings. The group bond with each other and together manage to teach Jimmy to read and Nadia to communicate with more humility. Shana confides in Waël that her father has sexually abused her, and he convinces her to tell her mother about it. Meanwhile, Ludo is being harassed by Franck, an unscrupulous police officer who threatens to tell the social authorities that Ludo's siblings should be placed in foster care unless Ludo agrees to sell drugs for him. Waël appears to believe that Franck is Ludo's youth worker and tells him that the €10 bills he gives to the kids every day are counterfeit. He claims that he regularly buys small sums in counterfeit money to use for minor transactions. Franck asks Waël to provide him with a very large sum in counterfeit bills. Waël reluctantly tells Franck that he will do it, but instead he contacts the police who turn up at the meeting place. In a flashback, it is revealed that Karim has told Waël about Ludo's trouble with Franck. When Franck realises that he has been betrayed, he shoots Waël in the leg. Waël survives and in the final scene of the film, the students give him a book of quotations, indicating that they knew all along that he had been pretending to be more than he was. By now they are all returning to the club of their own free will, however, without being paid for it.
Bad Seeds received mixed reviews in the press. Fabrice Leclerc who reviewed the movie for Paris Match praised Kheiron's acting skills, while Christophe Carrière in L'Express called him "n'est pas seulement drôle aussi pertinent". Other reviewers commented on the overly facile way in which conflicts were resolved or overlooked, which Nathalie Simon in Le Figaro called "naïve" while Scott Tobias in New York Times said that the message "...arrives one corny aphorism at a time". Eddie Strait in the Daily Dot, while admitting that the script contained many clichés, thought that the actors made up for it and argued that "...Bad Seeds hits the mark often enough to warrant watching."
