Arthur Harari may not yet be known as a director, but he won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for co-writing Anatomy of a Fall alongside Justine Triet. So his newest project, The Unknown, was one of the more anticipated films of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, but turned out to be one of the biggest disappointments of the festival.
What is The Unknown about?
The Unknown is adapted from Harari’s own graphic novel, The Cast of David Zimmerman (co-written with his brother, Lucas), who awakens in the body of a woman he encountered the night before. It’s an intriguing premise that blends body horror with gritty mystery and paranoia thriller elements, but it doesn’t deliver.
The Unknown Review
For a film whose premise is essentially a body-swapping version of It Follows, The Unknown is shockingly boring. A lot is happening, but it feels like there is no forward movement. There is a mystery involved, but you don’t care if it gets solved. And with an incredibly bloated runtime, you start to feel like you are counting every passing second.
The Unknown is also frustratingly ambiguous in a thematic sense. It’s great when a filmmaker wants to leave their experimental work up for interpretation, but Harari takes it to the point of pretentiousness here. Even before the film premiered at Cannes, Harari was fielding (and deflecting) questions about a potential trans allegory interpretation for the film, and that is not a good thing. It’s just very difficult to understand what Harari wants audiences to take away from this story, and because of that, you end up taking away nothing.
The single most annoying thing about The Unknown, though, is that almost all of its performances are delivered in a staggering monotone. And hearing these people talk in a monotone for nearly two-and-a-half hours would drive anyone insane. The only person in the cast who shows any real emotion in their role is Radu Jude, the Romanian filmmaker behind Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn and Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, who gives the film one of its few bursts of energy.
And the fact that this is the case in a body-swap movie should be evidence enough to the incompetence of Harari here. Body swap premises often result in some of the most fun performances. Look at Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis in Freaky Friday or Nic Cage and John Travolta in Face/Off. When someone is doing a body swap role, it’s essentially as if they are playing two different characters, which lends itself to wacky fun.
Léa Seydoux is absolutely the type of actress who should succeed in this type of role. We know she has the range to do crazy things like this. And on paper, this likely seemed like the type of role that would be incredibly challenging and demanding, leading to potential recognition, but Harari’s awful direction forsakes her. Harari should not be forgiven for depriving us of this type of performance from Seydoux.
The visuals of The Unknown are also incredibly garish, which should be a cardinal sin for any film adapted from a graphic novel. The film is downright ugly to look at, and while there are some ways you could read into this to justify it, such as creating a disillusioned perspective for the audience, much in the way the characters are growing dissociated from their world.
Is The Unknown worth watching?
The Unknown is straight-up one of the most unpleasant experiences at Cannes this year. Although the film is obviously meant to be uncomfortable, its impermeability means that it will not appeal to a significant majority of viewers. A few may connect with its distinctly strange wavelength, but for most, this is French nonsense at its worst.
The Unknown premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, which runs May 12-23.
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