A candy-coloured mystery/musical comedy with a dash of drama, young French director François Ozon's 8 Women positively revels in its own artifice while showcasing the crème de la crème of France's distaff acting corps to campy, terrifically entertaining effect. This tongue-in-cheek whodunnit is a trifle to be sure, but that doesn't stop it from being delicious just the same.

The film opens on a snowy winter night at a picture-book-perfect country house (cue a deer nibbling the vines running up the side of the building), as a family starts to gather for the holiday season. The impeccably bourgeois mother Gaby (Catherine Deneuve) and her elder daughter Suzon (Virginie Ledoyen) join grandmother Mamy (Danielle Darrieux, 85 and as formidable as they come), spinster sister Augustine (a tightly wound and hilarious Isabelle Huppert) and younger daughter Catherine (Ludivine Sagnier) to usher in the holidays. Also in the house are the new chambermaid Louise (Emmanuelle Béart) and the veteran housekeeper Mrs. Chanel (Firmine Richard). When young Catherine goes to wake up darling papa, she discovers him dead, with a hunting knife protruding from his back.

With the addition of the victim's trampy sister Pierette (Fanny Ardant)-who takes off her coast to reveal a dress so red as make your eyes pop-we have our eight women, one of whom must be the killer. Let the fun begin as the Agatha Christie-like cat-and-mouse game that is set in motion reveals all those family secrets that we like to keep hidden.

To reveal any more of the plot would be as criminal as the murder itself, but suffice it to say that all of the women are shown to have motive enough for the act. To reveal more of the plot would also be beside the point because 8 Women is more about the construction of a completely artificial world and what happens when you throw eight French divas into what is essentially one room. If you're former bad boy Ozon, what happens is they all spontaneously break into song and dance numbers at various times.

Yes, 8 Women is that kind of musical, but the musical numbers are there more to heighten the sense of playful artificiality than to show off the musical prowess of the actors involved. From the note-perfect production design to the colour-coordinated outfits of Deneuve et al. the film is all about the shiny surface of things. At times the frame is awash in so many clashing and complementary colours it's as if one were looking through a child's kaleidoscope pointed at a particularly vivid Jackson Pollock painting.

The acting is, as one would expect, uniformly fine but it is definitely Huppert's whining, hypochondriacal Augustine who chews the scenery with the most verve. You keep waiting for her to spontaneously combust, given the tightness of her characterization. The undertone of female, almost-lesbian, sexuality that she and the others bring to the whole movie (after all this IS an Ozon film) just adds another delicious if silly frisson to the mix. The scene of Ardant and Deneuve turning a hair-pulling catfight into a rolling-around-on-the-floor kiss is something I won't forget for a long time...