Emmanuel Bourdieu's Poison Friends (Les Amitiés Maléfiques) is a remarkable, if unevenly rendered, allegory on the education of young, idealistic yet misguided intellectuals. After arriving at the Sorbonne, Alexandre Pariente (Alexandre Steiger), Eloi Duhaut (Malik Zidi), and Edouard Franchon (Thomas Blanchard) come under the sway of charismatic older student André Morney (Thibault Vinçon), who preaches a rigid philosophy based on a line from writer Karl Kraus, "Why do some people write? Because they're too weak not to write." To André, anyone who dares pick up a pen is beneath contempt. While assisting the three friends in their academic pursuits, he also controls their lives through lies, bullying, and humiliation in attempt to mold disciples that can't surpass his achievements. It's not exactly comprehensible why the friends put up with André and his ridiculous ideas for so long and it's probably best chalked up to self-absorbed academia. Vinçon's performance conveys the attractive self-importance of his character, but the dialogue is not clever enough to make his Machiavellian manipulations entirely convincing. It seems that, as André's machinations become more sinister, the story might develop into a murder mystery along the lines of The Secret History. The evenly paced storytelling and impassively rendered compositions hint at a disaster to come. But after André leaves the school the drama blossoms into an analysis of the ways in which impressionable academics can become attracted to simplistic and appealing but untenable ideological creeds, how that developmental stage can be a base to grow into more mature intellectuals, and what happens when these students in turn angrily reject their former ideals and teachers.