19/05/2026 - CANNES 2026: The French filmmaker discusses his new film, a unique exploration of body swapping, the physical and the metaphysical, and the genres of fantasy and adventure

(© 2026 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it)

The Unknown is Arthur Harari’s third feature film, following Dark Inclusion (2017) and Onoda - 10 000 Nights in the Jungle (which opened the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 2021). The French filmmaker, who also won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Anatomy of a Fall, is in competition for the first time at the 79th Cannes Film Festival with a film starring Léa Seydoux and Niels Schneider.

Cineuropa: Was it a desire to create a cinematic experience that led you to make this body-swap film?
Arthur Harari: When my brother Lucas first told me the story, I sensed there was something potentially quite extraordinary to be done with it. Because it was about revealing and working with something invisible: a fantastical event occurs, it isn’t spectacular, but it changes everything. There was an existential experience and even a rather extraordinary metaphysical promise, simply in the fact of saying: this woman you see is a man on the inside. This experience of strangeness, of upheaval and a total reversal of one’s relationship with reality, seemed to me to be deeply connected to cinema: we film things, but we try to film what lies behind them, and that is an experience of consciousness. Sharing the secret of these characters, who are the only ones who know that they are not what they appear to be, was quite unprecedented. We had to find ways, starting from a story that was ultimately quite simple, to offer a journey through reality that would produce something emotionally extremely unsettling. This experience of being projected into another body reminded me of childhood, when you look at your parents and tell yourself that they aren’t really them, that they’ve been replaced. Or when you wake up and wonder if it’s all just a dream, if this is really reality. Or even the delusions of the matrix: telling yourself that you’re being acted out or dreamed by someone else. All these almost primal connections to the experience of being in the world.

When tackling the fantasy genre, great rigour is required to draw the viewer in. What were your key decisions regarding the screenplay?
It was all about imagination. At the same time, it’s a return to the roots of literary fantasy: an abnormal element is inserted into the natural course of the world, into reality. This is the case with Maupassant, with Gogol, in the fantasy tradition, and of course with Kafka. It is neither the marvellous nor science fiction; it is an element that seems impossible, but which does not render the world impossible — it is added to the world. The characters have changed bodies, which is, on the face of it, impossible, but we had to try to place the viewer in a position where they feel as though it is really happening, almost in a naturalistic or documentary way. The whole connection to the fantastic is embedded within that. We see nothing spectacular; there are no monsters; the metamorphosis is not physical — or rather, it is, but there are no physically abnormal features. What is abnormal is the realisation that inside, there is another consciousness, and that one is not in the normal body, not in the right body. From that point on, the fantastical experience had to be treated as if it were a real experience.

The big question was the explanations – a classic trope of fantasy or genre films. Because there’s a sort of conventional wisdom that says you should lay all your cards on the table for the viewer: at some point, they understand everything and an explanation comes from outside. I tried as hard as I could not to do that. The characters are living through this experience at ground level: they don’t know why or how it happened to them. I wanted to place the viewer in the same position of uncertainty and ignorance. The characters speculate a little, but they’re so shocked by what’s happening to them that they’re just trying, with the means at their disposal, to figure out what to do. It’s a mystery film, but we’ll never know exactly what the phenomenon is. The film is open to many interpretations. The characters themselves are forced to interpret. One of my references is the series The Leftovers, with its inexplicable disappearances and the confrontation with things that are very intimate, very real, completely dizzying and metaphysical.

How did you work on the film’s pacing to heighten the unsettling nature of the story?
The story had a basic simplicity to it: an unexplained body-swap and its consequences. Right from the writing stage, I told myself it would be an adventure film: the characters are faced with something extraordinary, something bigger than themselves, and they have to take action. They are heading towards something they don’t know; there are risks and surprises, and we don’t know where it will lead. The story’s very simple premise allowed for this richness. I didn’t want a conceptual film based on a very simple yet powerful premise that then went round in circles. So the surprise is constant because the characters are faced with completely crazy possibilities: seeing themselves from the outside, making love to themselves, getting pregnant whilst being a man, watching themselves die. All these impossible things become possible, and that opens up an exponential range of possibilities. I wanted the film to be very rich narratively, striking the right balance between realism and this almost soap-opera-like quality.

What about the sparse dialogue and the significance of the gaze?
There was no need for much dialogue, because experiencing a new body — as if looking at the world from within a shell that wasn’t one’s own — brings about powerful sensations that need no words. The film therefore relies heavily on glances and perceptions. The film’s starting point is the desire of a man who sees a woman whilst he himself is very detached from the world, unable to really engage with life or interact with people, and it is no coincidence that he hides behind a camera.

To what extent did you want to play on the sense of anxiety?
I knew the film revolved around that, but I didn’t want to emphasise it visually. It just had to come across, and above all the film had to be realistic – stylised, but not in an over-the-top way – and raw, because the characters are going through an extremely harsh ordeal. We had to feel the physicality, the unease, the discomfort, only to be released from it in the final part of the film.

Beyond the bodies, is this a film about time?
The experience of the body and that of time are linked. The body is a vessel that ages, passed down to us through our parents’ atoms, and which undergoes a kind of cycle. The film deals with metamorphosis and transformation over a very long period of time, and with what we are made of. The protagonist is, moreover, trapped in a lineage from which he cannot break free, a very dark one, marked by the figure of his father, who is said to have committed suicide and who had himself embarked on an obsessive study of time and disappearance. That’s life: we grow old and at some point, we look in the mirror and are surprised, telling ourselves that it isn’t us. Inside these bodies, we are above all machines for remembering, forgetting or thinking. The film, based on the very simple premise of an almost playful fantasy plot that draws on the conventions of the ‘body swap’ genre, seemed to me to be connected to this kind of meditation. But it isn’t a film with a hidden message. The only thing to understand is that we have to live the experience. The film holds up a mirror to the audience, and that mirror changes depending on who we are, reflecting things that are potentially quite intimate. But we have to let go, because when we have an experience, it’s not about analysing it step by step, but about feeling it, as in David Lynch’s films, for example. This doesn’t rule out coherence, but the power of the experience lies not in the explanation, but in the film’s experience — which is at once physical, mental and almost dreamlike.

(Translated from French)