Cannes 2026: From the Impossible to the Possible

All of a Sudden (Hamaguchi Ryusuke, 2026)

Hungarian director Nemes László returned to Cannes Competition with Moulin, his first appearance in the section since Son of Saul became one of the festival’s defining successes in 2015. The film centers on French Resistance hero Jean Moulin (Gilles Lellouche) and is set in Nazi-occupied France in 1943. Tasked by Charles de Gaulle with unifying the country’s fragmented resistance groups, Moulin is eventually betrayed during a clandestine meeting, arrested by the Gestapo chief of Lyon, Klaus Barbie (Lars Eidinger), and subjected to prolonged interrogation and torture. Moulin shares a fundamental creative logic with Son of Saul: both present suffering through an almost excessive process of aestheticization. In Son of Saul, it is a guided tour of the concentration camp through horror; in Moulin, suffering is repeatedly brought into extreme proximity through its interrogation scenes. Together, they reveal what might be called Nemes’s sensibility as a filmmaker of victimhood. Secure in the moral authority of his subject matter, he presents these unbearable experiences with uncompromising directness. One sequence in particular is deeply unsettling. After finally confirming the identity of the silent prisoner played by Lellouche, Barbie attempts to force Moulin to reveal additional information. While Moulin’s comrades are tortured off-screen, a Gestapo officer lifts Moulin’s lowered head with a gaze and gesture bordering on the sadistic, compelling him to witness the consequences of his silence. Moulin then looks directly into the camera—and therefore directly at the audience. Through Lellouche’s gaze, Nemes effectively transforms the spectator into an accomplice. As in Son of Saul, his moral worldview is not merely presented but penetrated. The relationship between screen and audience becomes overtly ethicized. This is a genuinely dangerous form of filmmaking because it leaves no room for possibility. Occupying the moral high ground from the outset, it commits itself entirely to a binary worldview founded upon ideological opposition. One is left wondering how fundamentally different this is from any other form of politically instrumentalized “propaganda” cinema.

Fatherland suffers from a related structural problem. The film begins with Thomas Mann’s return to Germany in 1949 and follows his journey with his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) from Frankfurt in West Germany to Weimar in East Germany, where Mann is to receive the Goethe Prize. Through this journey, the film attempts to explore postwar German cultural identity. East and West Germany are constructed as two sharply contrasting spatial systems. On one side stand free media and consumer culture; on the other, disciplined social life and symbols of collectivism. The visual organization is lucid and coherent, but it also reveals a conceptual framework imposed in advance, reducing historical complexity to symbolic opposition. Some viewers have detected a sense of nostalgia in Fatherland. Perhaps this reflects the experience of voluntary exile itself, just as Thomas Mann’s departure for the United States and the broader question he could never answer: where exactly is Heimat? Yet the film’s binary structure ultimately limits the emergence of genuine emotional experience. Nostalgia remains an announced theme rather than a lived feeling.

Vertiginous (Quentin Dupieux, 2026)

The final Competition title to premiere, Valeska Grisebach’s The Dreamed Adventure, ultimately received the Jury Prize. In many ways, the film extends the project begun with her 2017 feature Western, while simultaneously dismantling some of the conventions of the Western genre itself. Adrian, the intermediary figure who controlled local resources in Western, reappears here in transformed form. Under the name Said (Syuleyman Alilov Letifov), he arrives in Svilengrad, the Bulgarian border town where Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece meet. On his way to conduct business with local mafia, Said reunites with his old friend Veska (Yana Radeva), a respected archaeologist determined to help him. The following morning, however, Said disappears without explanation, and the narrative shifts to Veska’s path through the region. The film’s significance lies not in plot development but in the way reality and history are continually narrated by different social groups. Farmers, laborers, sex workers, Polish migrant workers and gangsters collectively generate an expanding network of oral histories. Svilengrad emerges as a world composed through the accumulation of stories, revealing a vision of European order that Western Europe itself often prefers not to see.

Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s All of a Sudden offers multiple forms of possibility. As Mari (Okamoto Tao) says within the film itself—to make the impossible possible. The first possibility is that of the unexpected encounter. Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira) first becomes connected to Mari after noticing Tomoki (Kurosaki Kodai) running after a tram and worrying for his safety. Mari, using a tracking device, eventually locates him. A chance event generates a new relationship. The second possibility lies in language. Marie-Lou, a native French speaker, and Mari, a native Japanese speaker, communicate fluently in one another’s languages throughout the film. The result feels almost miraculous. To achieve this, both Efira and Okamoto learned each other’s languages, a commitment that helped earn them the festival’s Best Actress prize. Compared to this, Léa Seydoux's occasional and visibly rehearsed German in Gentle Monster feels conspicuously artificial, much like the film’s insistence that her character is a capable pianist. The third possibility concerns grassroots forms of collective organization. It begins with Marie-Lou’s attempt to reform a nursing home by introducing a more humane model of care. The proposal places additional burdens on staff and quickly reaches an impasse. Only after Mari moves into the facility does the situation begin to change. Like the elderly residents, Mari is living in the shadow of death. The film suggests that meaningful transformation becomes possible only when those approaching death are recognized as subjects with agency rather than passive recipients of care. From this recognition emerges a small-scale form of self-organization capable of opening a crack within an apparently airtight capitalist system. Conflict is not the engine of the narrative. Instead, the film is built around a series of unexpected encounters that transform possibility itself into a structural reality. These possibilities may be utopian. Yet in a fractured world, who offers a warmer or more hopeful answer than Hamaguchi?

Another form of possibility appeared throughout Directors’ Fortnight. Unlike Competition films, where artistic prestige often imposes its own constraints, the section retains a greater freedom of form. In The Diary of a Chambermaid, this manifests through Radu Jude’s characteristic low-budget digital aesthetic. Video calls between Gianina and her daughter are heavily compressed, producing images that feel simultaneously crude and authentic. Quentin Dupieux represents another unconventional path. His animated feature Vertiginous employs intentionally rough character models whose movement and visual precision frequently appear inadequate by contemporary standards. Characters sometimes walk awkwardly, almost as if the animation itself were malfunctioning. Yet within precisely this framework, a line spoken by Jacques (voiced by Alain Chabat) to his friend Bruno (Jonathan Cohen)—“We live in a simulated world”—feels entirely appropriate. In their appreciation of what might be called a glitch aesthetic, Dupieux and Bruno Dumont arrive at surprisingly similar conclusions. In several shots of Red Rocks, child actors stare directly into the camera. Traditional production logic would classify this as a performance mistake. Dumont leaves the moments intact, just as he previously preserved actors breaking character and laughing in Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc. Such errors often contain the most valuable moments in filmmaking because they preserve states of being that no performance can fully reproduce.

The Unknown (Arthur Harari, 2026)

The final possibility emerged from Competition’s most mysterious film: Arthur Harari’s The Unknown, adapted from the graphic novel The Case of David Zimmerman, which he created with his brother Lucas. Its protagonist, photographer David Zimmerman (Niels Schneider), lives a life largely detached from society. After being persuaded by a friend to attend a party, he takes a drug in an attempt to relax. There he becomes fascinated by a woman (Léa Seydoux), who appears to be watching him. He follows her into a hidden room, loses consciousness after a sexual encounter, and awakens to discover that he now inhabits the woman’s body. David later finds out that the woman he inhabits is named Eva. As he desperately searches for himself, he eventually locates his former body—only to discover that it is now inhabited by another woman, Maila (Lilith Grasmug). Body-swapping is hardly a novel premise. Yet Harari’s screenplay opens extraordinary possibilities. Even this brief synopsis already suggests a series of variations on identity anxiety. Schneider’s male body successively contains David, Eva and Maila; Seydoux’s female body contains both Eva and David. If psychological gender rather than biological sex is applied to the film’s sexual encounters, those encounters become, in turn, heterosexual, homosexual and even, “pegging”. Remarkably, the film has little interest in sexuality as a political topic. Rather than entering contemporary gender debates, it moves toward a genuinely fluid queer experience. National identity generates another layer. Eva is German, David is a French Jew, and Maila descends from Romanian migrant workers in France. The body exchanges therefore hint at an alternative narrative of twentieth-century European history.

Through the accumulation of gender, religion, ethnicity and countless other identity markers, The Unknown reaches a state that no single identity category can adequately define. Formally, Harari’s camera seems haunted by the spirit of Antonioni, drifting ghost-like through the suburbs of Paris. Continuous environmental sounds linking one scene to the next deepen the film’s spectral atmosphere, recalling one of Harari’s acknowledged inspirations: Hitchcock’s Vertigo. And these are merely some of the threads I have been able to identify after two viewings. With The Unknown, Harari achieves a genuinely open cinema—one capable of containing both history and the present while resisting any attempt to reduce either to a single interpretation.