Review: The Unknown
- CANNES 2026: Arthur Harari opens a gateway to the impossible and delivers an extraordinary, cryptic work on human identity, cloaked in the unsettling and disturbing guise of fantasy cinema
“I don't know what happened to you, what happened to me”, “what's going on?”, “do you recognise me?”, “where are we?”, “where is she?”. Welcome to the inner world, filled with enigmas and secrets, of Arthur Harari’s The Unknown, a fascinating, gripping and dizzying film that pushes the boundaries to the point of discomfort, unveiled in competition at the 79th Cannes Film Festival. By blurring the boundaries of perception between body and mind, the French filmmaker (an Oscar winner for the screenplay of Anatomy of a Fall) boldly ventures across the bridge into the seemingly highly codified territory of genre and investigative film, centring on a totally inexplicable, oppressive, nightmarish event that radically calls into question the very existence of its protagonists, trapped in another dimension. But in reality, at a deeper level and in the reflections of the mirrors, he weaves an immensely sophisticated tapestry on the human condition, life and death, time and memory, leaving the doors and windows open to all interpretations.
"It'll do you good. Do you want to or not?" Dragged by friends to a frenzied carnival party, the solitary photographer David (Niels Schneider) decides to pop a little pill before later being captivated by the gaze of a woman (Léa Seydoux), whom he follows down to the basement where she engages him in intense, wordless sex. When David regains consciousness, staggering with drunkenness, and is put into a taxi, he catches a fleeting glimpse of the stranger’s face in the rear-view mirror. When he wakes up the next morning, he realises, utterly shocked, the obvious truth: he now is in this woman’s body. A stranger who is, however, not quite a stranger, since he had already noticed (and photographed) her working as a waitress at a golden wedding anniversary reception where he had been commissioned to take portraits. In a panic, David tries to find her (and thus find himself), as a cryptic note in a torn pocket of the woman’s raincoat puts him on the trail. One thing leading to another, he soon discovers his physical identity: Eva. And the next day, he finally gets his hands back on his own body. But, in a second turn of events, it is no longer inhabited by Eva, but by Malia (Lilith Grasmug), a young woman who has suffered the same misfortune as David. Together, they join their distraught, even desperate, forces to unravel this most peculiar affair, which has enormous consequences on their lives…
Mastering the surface level of the investigation to perfection through a system of nested clues (photographic evidence, a face on a leaflet, film credits, a second flat, a passport, a homeless lookalike, blue trainers, mobile phone tracking, appeals for witnesses, backstory, etc.) and plot twists, the film also plays on a pervasive atmosphere of depressive anxiety (narrative, visual and musical) with a realism tinged with Kafkaesque disorientation. Weaving an infinite number of suggestive details organically into the plot, Arthur Harari crafts the more obscure layers of his narrative with the precision of a goldsmith, multiplying the threads (metempsychosis, the drug DMT with near-death experiences, predation, a sweeping of psychoanalytic karma, an imaginary plunge à la Alice in Wonderland, schizophrenia, but above all the topic of suicide, alluded to on several discreet occasions – cf. Robert Salengro). He subtly shares his existentialist and metaphysical reflections on the nature of human experience, which results in a brilliantly daring and immensely rich film, the packaging of which will nevertheless surely baffle more than a few.
The Unknown was produced by French companies bathysphère Productions and To Be Continued Productions, and co-produced by Pathé Films (France), France 2 Cinéma, Logical Content Ventures (France), Ascent Film (Italy), Rai Cinema (Italy) and 2632-7197 Quebec (Canada). Pathé handles international sales.
(Translated from French)
Photogallery 18/05/2026: Cannes 2026 - The Unknown
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