We Believe You (2025) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: whenever the children misbehave
Take a Drink: whenever the mother panics
Take a Drink: for each new complicating and shocking detail revealed
Do a Shot: each time the children see the father
By: Henry J. Fromage (Three Beers) –
I don’t envy a Family Court judge their responsibility in the slightest, needing to ascertain the truth in the most emotionally charged of circumstances, often where it’s just the words of one person against another, each with their ulterior motives.
We Believe You tells one such story, contained entirely within a Family Court in Belgium. A mother ferries two recalcitrant children to court. They freeze when they see their father there as well. Eventually the two parents and their respective lawyers are brought to the judge’s chambers, where they will make their cases in turn.
A Toast
Writers/Directors Charlotte Devillers and Arnaud Dufeys establish an intriguing environment and setup for what ultimately will come down to five testimonies delivered one after another to a judge. This courthouse is all washed out white environments, sterile and otherworldly, like a particularly secular Belgian Limbo. A place where justice is dispassionate, deliberate, and slow.
Alice (Myriem Akheddiou) is none of these things, or perhaps past being able to be any of these things. The opening predisposes us to believe this mother and her children, but complicates it with their extreme behavior as it goes along. All of them are at very least at the end of their ropes when it comes to the father, unless something else is afoot.
Devillers and Dufeys keep you engrossed via the gradual uncovering of the story via the back and forth of lawyers, social worker, and then the adults themselves. For all the weaknesses of the film, this, the meat of the film, positively crackles.
Beer Two
The directors might have been better served leaning more into or away from ambiguity- the middle ground pathway they choose is disorienting, and not entirely in a “who can we actually believe” sort of way. It’s clear from the beginning that the children are afraid of their father, so much so that all of the mother’s borderline unhinged outbursts can’t quite sway you into doubting that.
Beer Three
The entire trial/judgment feels like a moot point as soon as we discover the ongoing criminal investigation of the father, and the penultimate scenes lean a bit ridiculous- why does this court allow so much access between either party? Is there no security at all there?
Verdict
We Believe You funnels an all-too-common familial nightmare through the ponderously slow wheels of justice.
