The Unknown

A slow-burn body swap mystery that made me want to body swap with someone who wasn’t in the cinema, Arthur Harari’s self-serious film has Léa Seydoux’s mysterious Parisian Eva and depressed photographer David Zimmerman (Niels Schneider) exchanging bodies after a club-night shag. Purportedly an investigation into sex, identity and gender, it drags through further improbable plot developments to a melodramatic climax that elicits little more than a shrug.

Harari makes up one half of French cinema’s new power couple with Anatomy of a Fall director Justine Triet, and he co-wrote that tantalising thriller. Here, he teams up with screenwriters Lucas Harari and Vincent Poymiro, although it’s not clear why it took three screenwriters to pull together such daft scenes as Eva-as-David types ‘transmigration after sex’ into a search engine as they try to figure out what the hell has happened to them. Obviously, you would turn to Google or ChatGPT if you suddenly woke up in a different body, but it’s still a glaring motif for The Unknown’s literalist approach to communicating what this bizarre metaphysical experience is like. 

As Eva and David draw closer in their attempts to unpick the mystery, another young woman, Malia (Lilith Grasmug), is drawn into this Gordian knot. Some other entity – perhaps a distant French cousin of the malignant force in It Follows? – is at work within them.

Seydoux brings a repressed strain of her usual charisma, but the performances mostly unfold at the same soporific register as the sparse piano score, lending the film a deadening quality where there ought to be a swirl of emotion and deepening mystery. Impish Romanian auteur Radu Jude pops up as Malia’s dad. If only he could have lent this film some of his maverick zest. 

The Unknown premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.