‘The Unknown’ Cannes Review: Lea Seydoux Carries a Man’s Lost Soul Through One of Cannes’ Most Bracingly Original Films

There is something genuinely mysterious about the world as The Unknown presents it — a quality that announces itself from the film’s very first frames through its elusive staging, its unsettling score, and its curious, slightly disoriented way of looking at things. David Zimmerman (Niels Schneider), one of its central figures, observes that world from behind a camera, with the studied distance photographers often cultivate as both method and defense. Moving through corners and building facades with his lens, he will soon find himself consumed by the image of a woman he once photographed — a woman whose negative hangs on the wall of his studio like an obsession he has never quite named.

David arrives at a costume party where the festive, carnivalesque atmosphere seems to belong to everyone but him. Even before things start going wrong, he already looks like a man at war with his own inner life. Then — after taking an unfamiliar drug someone assures him will help him relax — he spots her across the room: the woman from the photograph. In a clear nod to Antonioni’s Blow-Up, the image that haunts him has now stepped into the real world. Her name is Eva, and she is played by Léa Seydoux. They exchange a look. Minutes later, they are having an intense and urgent sexual encounter behind the scenes.

What happens next is not what you expect. In a register that fuses Cronenbergian body horror with the physical comedy of early Steve Martin, David wakes up in Eva’s body — with no explanation and no map back. He returns home, examines this new self in minute, desperate detail, and starts to panic. If he is inside Eva, is she inside him? David-as-Eva begins to investigate: searching for clues about the woman whose face he now wears, trying to track down his own body, and hoping to find some way to reverse what has happened.

What follows is resolutely unconventional. Harari, who directed Onoda and co-wrote Anatomy of a Fall, refuses to route the story through the well-worn channels of thriller or science fiction. Instead, The Unknown — adapted from the graphic novel Le cas David Zimmerman, which Harari co-wrote with his brother Lucas — stays inside its protagonist’s angst and bewilderment, the pure, grinding confusion of someone who cannot understand what happened to them or how to undo it. That search leads David through esoteric online subcultures and a tip that someone may have seen him — or at least his former body. When Eva eventually crosses his path again, the idea of a clean reversal turns out to be far more complicated than either of them imagined, the knot tighter and more resistant to untying than it first appeared.

Somewhere between Antonioni, Bergman, and Resnais, with a dash of De Palma’s psychological suspense and the freedom of genre filmmaking reimagined through a realist lens, Harari has made a film that looks almost nothing like the contemporary French cinema that tends to populate the Cannes lineup. It feels closer in spirit to the creative liberty of the 1960s — its eccentricities, its willingness to follow a thought into strange and uncharted territory.

It is a film about identity and the loss of self; about the disorientation of waking up somewhere you don’t recognize, in circumstances you didn’t choose. The Unknown is elusive and deliberately slow, built from long takes and extended silences that Harari converts into tension through both his psychological score and the remarkable work of Léa Seydoux, who convincingly inhabits what is, at its core, a man utterly lost inside a woman’s body, struggling to adapt to a reality he never agreed to inhabit.

The film calls to mind, in certain moments, Under the Skin, with its protagonist navigating strange and disquieting encounters with people who are themselves mysteries. A Kafkaesque sex scene near the midpoint stands as one of the film’s finest sequences — a highpoint in a surreal, elusive narrative that, rather than escaping into overtly fantastical or Lynchian territory, insists on remaining tethered to something that resembles everyday reality. That insistence is the point. Everything we think of as real — our name, our body, our gender — is, the film quietly suggests, a construction like any other: provisional, contingent, and far more fragile than we ever allow ourselves to believe.