22/07/2025 - Bastien Bouillon shines with a dark glow in a story about control mixing together psychological realism and suspense, signed Nathalie Najem

“He is hard to love. You just need to not love him from too close.” In a daily life where solitude is often difficult to live with, as much emotionally as economically, an addiction to feelings can reveal itself to be very dangerous. If the loved individual happens to be driven by torturous intentions and an unhappiness that radiates into lies and a desire for control and manipulation, the Damocles sword of violence can rot the situation into a dead end, like an invisible cage from which it is crucial yet very complicated to escape. Such is the topic, between life and death drives, that has taken on Nathalie Najem with No Way Back, her directorial debut feature, released in French theatres on 23 July by Paname Distribution.

“I don’t want to lie to you, but you’re not gonna like it.” In the image of this confession by Joachim (Bastien Bouillon), a heroin addict clinging on to his girlfriend Shirine (Alexia Chardard) who works in Sicily identifying migrants who have drowned, the script written by the filmmaker doesn’t try to hide the destructive atmosphere hanging over a man who knows how to play with his seductive fragility. Another woman is in fact very well placed to know its perils: his previous partner, Laura (a very credible Zita Hanrot), living alone in Nice with Lou (Maya Hirsbein), their 9-year-old daughter, anxiously on the lookout for calls from this former lover whose many sides she knows all too well, and who she therefore keeps at a distance but with whom she nevertheless shares a child.

It is through this mirror of the two women that the double portrait of control is drawn: a present, physical, isolating and threatening stranglehold that will very quickly get out of hand with Shirine’s escape and chase by Joaquim, while on Laura’s side, it is the heavy psychological impact of the past that weighs on her (notably on her ability to trust in order to rebuild her sentimental life) and which will soon be reincarnated in the flesh (“Open! You wanted me to come back, well, here I am!”) with the return of Joaquim in Nice (where Shirine has come to hide). And in the middle of all this, little Lou watches and listens to this tumultuous world of adults struggling with fear, wounds and ambivalence (denouncing someone we love despite everything or who we’ve loved isn’t so easy).

Alternating between intimate sequences and narrative accelerations in the realistic thriller register, Najem weaves the terrifying net of perverse harassment all while carefully avoiding black-and-white thinking and subtly navigating between compassion and condemnation towards the author of that control. An ambiguity and an exploration of grey areas ideally served by an excellent Bastien Bouillon who, since his rise to fame with The Night of the 12th [+see also:
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trailer
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film profile], demonstrates in each film the full range of his talents as a shape-shifter. Well supported by the two female stars and by some very good secondary roles (Aurélien Gabrielli and Marianne Basler), the actor gives all its dark glow to a character whose fragility is toxic, and to a debut feature that avoids easy answers and digs into the painful heart of its subject while carefully dosing tension without making it an attractive varnish.

No Way Back was produced by 31 Juin Films. Indie Sales is handling international sales.

(Translated from French)