Arthur Harari is back at Cannes with The Unknown, one of the strangest movies to play in the film festival’s main competition in years.
Harari, the grandson of Egyptian-French actor Clement Harari, saw his career soar at Cannes three years ago with the acclaimed legal drama Anatomy of a Fall (2023) which he co-wrote with his off-screen partner, director Justine Triet. The film went on to win the prestigious Palme d’Or, as well as earning five Oscar nominations, with Harari and Triet taking home the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
With mainstream success often comes artistic freedom, and there can be no doubt Harari – who co-wrote The Unknown with his younger brother Lucas – takes risks with his third film as director.
The body-swap story has been done before in Hollywood, to comical effect, in movies such as Freaky Friday and Big. Make no mistake, The Unknown does not go for the funny bone. Unsettling, obtuse and disturbing, it feels like a crafty mix of David Cronenberg and Charlie Kaufman.
Set in France, the film introduces David (Niels Schneider), a lank-haired photographer who is something of a loner. “David is very fragile,” remarks one of his very few friends, but even this is underselling it.
Early in the story, he attends a Halloween-like costume party – an evocative scene with revellers taking sticks to huge model heads of Trump, Putin et al, beating them like pinatas, setting the tone for the strangeness to come.
David notices a woman named Eva (Lea Seydoux). Without exchanging a word, he follows her into a basement, where the two share a brief but intense encounter. When Eva suddenly collapses, David leaves – but when she wakes up, she is now him as the two have swapped bodies.
David – who is now inside Eva's body – is naturally freaked out, spending the first few hours staring at the female form he now inhabits. Googling the possibilities of body-swapping, he looks up ideas of reincarnation and hallucinations, but the only real solution is to track down Eva, a waitress from Germany, who is now dealing with being inside David’s body.
If it were a typical Hollywood movie, there’d be a bolt of lightning or a magic spell to transform them back, but the Harari brothers offer no easy solutions, which becomes increasingly confusing when a third party gets involved.
There are lulls and detours, some of them unnecessary in a film that runs to 146 minutes – especially when the characters go down Reddit-like rabbit holes to see if anyone else has suffered a similar fate.
To its credit, The Unknown never loses its dreamlike sense of unease. Seydoux, known to many for playing the woman who finally won over Daniel Craig’s James Bond, had already delivered one of the festival’s most talked-about performances in Gentle Monster, in which she plays a woman who discovers her husband has been selling explicit images of children online. Here, however, she gives a far more exposed and emotionally vulnerable performance.
Sombrely shot by yet another member of the Harari family – Arthur and Lucas’s older brother Tom – the film is also ominously scored with a piano motif that comes on like the refrain in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
The Unknown is not a film for all; at times, it’s a confusing watch that you may resent puzzling out. But in exploring issues of the body, and how we are imprisoned by the flesh we’re given, Harari has crafted something undeniably unique.
