‘Grand Ciel’ Venice Review: Labor Struggles in the Shadow of Progress

French cinema has long been preoccupied with stories rooted in the workplace, where struggles over labor, rights, and dignity take center stage. Strikes, layoffs, demonstrations, and the quiet desperation of those caught in cycles of precarity: these are themes that recur so often they have become almost a subgenre of their own. Directors like Stéphane Brizé have built careers around depicting these conflicts with stark realism, while filmmakers such as Laurent Cantet or the Belgian Dardenne brothers consistently return to working-class milieus to ground their narratives in the everyday battles of survival. To this lineage now comes Grand Ciel, the latest feature from Hata, a Japanese-born director who has made France his home. His film enters the world of construction labor, but with a twist: beneath the dust and noise of a mega-development project, something darker and more uncanny seems to be at work.

The story follows Vincent (Damien Bonnard), a construction worker who takes the night shift to earn a little extra money, sacrificing time with his wife and young child. His family dreams of escaping their cramped apartment and one day moving into “Grand Ciel”, the gleaming luxury complex that is slowly rising out of the mud and scaffolding. It is a utopian promise of towers, shops, and landscaped parks that is scheduled to open in 2035. Vincent knows it is out of reach, but the dream lingers—fueled in part by his wife’s job as a promoter for the project, which gives them just enough proximity to imagine themselves on the other side of the divide.

On the worksite, however, things are less promising. The workers face a series of setbacks that lead to talk of strikes. Vincent is trusted by his supervisors, and this trust puts him in a difficult position: should he side with the management that relies on him, or with his colleagues, who are pushing for fairer treatment? Matters take a sinister turn when one of the crew—an undocumented immigrant—vanishes without a trace. His disappearance is brushed aside by the company, but among the workers it sows fear and suspicion. In an effort to diffuse the unrest, Vincent is appointed as the intermediary between the bosses and his fellow laborers, a role that quickly proves untenable. He wants to secure his future, but his conscience keeps pulling him toward solidarity. The dilemma only sharpens when another worker suffers a serious accident on site, and the fragile balance collapses.

What distinguishes Grand Ciel from many other French social dramas is the way Hata infuses this realist framework with an eerie, almost supernatural undertone. The construction site becomes a haunted space, filled with strange sounds that echo through the half-finished buildings. At times it feels as if the structures themselves are alive, swallowing the men who toil within them. Hata never spells it out—these spectral touches remain suggestive, metaphorical—but the effect is unsettling. It is as though the monstrous logic of the development itself, and by extension of global capitalism, consumes human lives as raw material. Workers vanish, accidents multiply, and the dream of progress begins to resemble a nightmare.

Visually, the film embraces a muted palette of grays and nocturnal blues, emphasizing the exhaustion of night labor and the sterility of a future designed only for the wealthy. Bonnard brings a weary physicality to Vincent, torn between loyalty to his family and a creeping awareness that he is complicit in a system that will never reward him. The performances of the supporting cast—many of them nonprofessionals—further ground the film in lived experience, making the moments of uncanny dissonance feel all the more jarring.

In the end, Grand Ciel occupies a fascinating space between social realism and allegorical horror. It acknowledges the familiar tropes of the labor film—the negotiations, the fractures, the collective power of workers—but refracts them through a lens that makes the violence of capitalism feel both literal and spectral. Hata’s achievement lies in showing how exploitation operates not just through policies and contracts, but also through the atmosphere of dread it produces, the sense that an invisible force is always watching, waiting, erasing.

Grand Ciel is a film about work, yes, but also about dreams: the dream of a better life, the dream of belonging, the dream of safety. For Vincent and his family, those dreams hover just out of reach, tantalizingly visible across the construction fence. The irony, of course, is that the very system building those dreams is the same one that destroys the people who build them.