Cannes at Home: A Polarizing Pandemonium
Thursday, May 21, 2026 at 6:00PM 
Adèle Exarchopoulos won a César for Jeanne Herry's ALL YOUR FACES. Will her new collaboration with the director, presently at Cannes, produce similar results?
The 2026 Cannes Film Festival is drawing to a close, so I should probably hurry up with this corresponding Cannes at Home program. In the past few days, a number of titles have come and gone on the Croisette, most of them eliciting wildly divisive reactions. Nobody seems to agree on the merits of Na Hong-jin’s Hope, and Arthur Harari’s The Unknown has proven similarly polarizing. While some bet on Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord for the Palme, others are decrying it as a minor work, if not an outright failure. Elisa is a fan, for instance, but TFE’s old friend Nick Davis is a naysayer. In the middle of all this, László Némes’ historical Moulin and Jeanne Herry’s Garance have mostly slipped by under the radar, drawing little attention while also sparing themselves the lacerating putdowns their bolder, more ambitious competition has inspired in film critics and audiences alike.
For this lightning round of Cannes at Home, let’s run this gamut of filmmakers in capsule form. Their films are Nemes’ handsome Sunset, Herry’s actorly All Your Faces, Na’s go-for-broke bonkers The Wailing, Harari’s portrait of Onoda, and Mungiu’s first foray into the intolerance that can emerge in European communities beset by the arrival of outsiders, R.M.N...
SUNSET (2018) László Nemes
In 1913 Budapest, as the Old Continent was slipping into what would come to be known as the Great War, a milliner tries to rebuild her life by gaining employment at the famed hat store that once belonged to her family. Legacies are denied as is her labor, though the possibility of a long-lost brother lurking somewhere in the city keeps the young woman from leaving the Hungarian capital. What starts as a personal odyssey soon sours into a traverse through purgatory as embodied by a world on the verge of collapse, where the air itself seems heavy with sinister secrets, riddles, some obscene truths better left unturned. And yet, like Alice in Wonderland, or perchance Dante in hell, our protagonist remains steadfast in her descent.
For his follow-up to Son of Saul, László Nemes upped the ante considerably, proposing a production of significant sumptuousness, full of period detail at a scale that feels elephantine when compared to the director’s feature debut. However, his thematic interests and formal approach remain tied to the strategies deployed for that Holocaust drama. The camera is obsessively close to its subjects, often abstracting the background into a murky mess. Indeed, much of the period recreation is lost in framing if not arranged near the actor’s faces. Hats are given a prominent place in the mise-en-scène, of course, providing the picture’s most significant triumph in visual storytelling. A hat can tell you a lot about the one wearing it, the one who made it, the time and place where it came to be.
Sound is deliberately oppressive, bearing down on the characters and the viewer, while the screen appears veiled in an amber varnish that both communicates the yellowed tint of old photographs and the titular twilight. That bronzed patina is also oppressive in its own right. In this and other ways, Sunset suffocates us all, using bold formalism to test the limits of an audience’s willingness to sink into the putrefaction of a Europe coughing up a death rattle. And yet, there’s a slippery elusiveness to the enterprise that fascinates, as do Nemes’ forays into an impressionistic register that’s more oneiric than visceral in what it unfurls within the audience’s gut, their heart, their dwindling patience.
Sunset is streaming on Klassiki. You can also rent or purchase it on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Spectrum, and Fandango at Home.
ALL YOUR FACES (2023) Jeanne Herry
Since 2014, the French criminal justice system has implemented a program of restorative justice that promotes dialogue between offenders and those victimized in criminal actions. These meetings are supervised, intent on providing a safe space for both injurers and injured alike, transcending punitive notions of justice to instead aim at rehabilitation. Sometimes, these interactions can take forms familiar to those in support groups, AA, or their ilk. In her most acclaimed film to date, director Jeanne Herry dramatizes one such group, intent on portraying the various facets of the initiative, which also extends to the professionals and volunteers who stand as third-party moderators.
There’s little in the way of narrative shape, with the action rarely leaving these controlled dialogues. However, arcs are drawn within individual characterizations, and some forays outside the main group provide Philosophical quandaries that may reorient one’s perspective on the project’s worth. Sure, Herry and company are evident proponents of the restorative justice initiative, yet All Your Faces skirts outward pedagogy or pamphleteer activism. Its intention as a piece of advocacy is difficult to deny, but this prescriptive text allows itself complexity with a case-by-case ambivalence on the value of forgiveness.
More concerning, for this particular viewer, the film never ceases feeling like an actors’ exercise, mayhap a workshop around a shared premise. Thankfully, the ensemble’s quality is enough to sustain that model for the most part, as one can start to surmise by just how many César acting nominations All Your Faces got – four nominations for Best Supporting Actress! I’m especially drawn to Adèle Exarchopoulos as a survivor whose story unfolds at the film’s margins. The one scene with Raphaël Quenard as the sibling who once molested her character is among the greatest in the thespian’s rich filmography. It’s so excellent that it might have survived as a short film, independent of the rest of Herry’s actors' roundtable.
All Your Faces is streaming on Kanopy. You can also rent and purchase it on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV and Fandango at Home.
THE WAILING (2016) Na Hong-jin
A decade after the fact, I can still feel the ghost of ritual drums resounding through the theater with enough force that my internal organs seemed to pulse in tandem. The sounds were an assault but, if possible, they were also the sequence’s gentlest element. Kim Sun-min’s editing certainly cut deeper and more startlingly, while the performances became heightened to such degrees of derangement that it felt like re-learning human behavior on the spot. And then, there was the narrative context of these happenings, a family’s desperate attempt to save themselves from annihilation amid a community beset by forces from beyond, vulnerable to the doings of two magical men of dubious intention. A putative last resort, a last shred of hope, only felt like a further sinking into nihilism.
Whenever I’ve revisited Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing, that set piece brings me back to the night I first encountered the South Korean horror epic. It was love at first sight, but the passion has only deepened with time, matching a growing appreciation of just what this director achieved with only his third feature. The story he purports to tell is both simple and hopelessly convoluted, stretched beyond reason at 156 minutes that feel as if they are actively trying to pulverize the viewer. The formal strategies certainly do that, unrelenting from start to finish. Acting is similarly big, sketching broad-stroked stylization that’s always living in the tension between dehumanizing caricature and a deeply human sense of suffering and humbling incomprehension. While I can see why some would decry such maximalist performances as failures, to me, they’re genius.
The Wailing’s the sort of film that leaves one exhausted. This is no accident but a clear purpose that balances the lurid entertainment of horror and all the B-movie genre imaginings Na is pulling from with an almost alienating cruelty and technical virtuosity capable of leaving a formalist like myself on the edge of ecstasy. It’s no coincidence that, along with the rush of the shamanic sequence that brings forth those drums, my biggest impression from the night I first saw The Wailing is how painful the whole experience felt, how that ardor lingered, aching, for days, weeks, months, maybe years. After all, by its conclusion, the film refuses to relinquish the faintest hint of catharsis, pushing the viewer into the acceptance that this world of ours is an evil place and we’re all at its mercy if not sources of evil ourselves. It’s gross in body and spirit, befitting one of the 2010s’ defining feel-bad movies.
The Wailing is streaming on Bloody Stream TV, Kanopy, Rakuten Viki, YOW TV and The Roku Channel. You can also rent or purchase it on Amazon Prime Video and Fandango at Home.
ONODA: 10,000 NIGHTS IN THE JUNGLE (2021) Arthur Harari
At the end of World War II, Hiroo Onoda was posted to Lubong Island in the Philippines, serving as a lieutenant to three other soldiers under his command. Sent on a mission of guerrilla warfare, the young military man was somewhat insulated from the rest of the conflict, hiding in the wilderness and away from civilization. When Japan surrendered, neither he nor his men had any way of knowing. However, when encountering the news, Onoda refused to accept the truth of the matter. So, for the next 29 years, he remained faithful to the Imperial Army’s orders, carrying out operations in a war that only existed in his imagination. From local nuisance to national myth, historical curio, piece of iconography, and joke, Onoda’s story is a fascinating one.
So, it should come as no surprise that some intrepid filmmaker would try to tell it. Though that’s not necessarily what Arthur Harari did with his 10,000 Nights in the Jungle. The writer-director has insisted that his picture is a work of historical speculation, more of a fictional character study than a straight biopic or even an adaptation of Onoda’s memoirist writings. Considering how narrativized every biography turns out to be on screen, one can wonder if the distinction Harari insists upon is merely a matter of semantics. Whatever the case may be, 10,000 Nights in the Jungle is shaped by the precepts of the historical epic, though it comes to us depurated, expansive in ideas and landscapes, yet tightly focused and somewhat small. That descriptor is not meant as a dig against the film, mind you.
Because this is the sort of work that thrives in the specificity of character work seen up close and intimately. In practice, this means Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle anchors itself around a set of performances so masterful as to make you question just how Harari was able to direct them while working in a language not his own. The double act of Yuya Endo and Kanji Tsuda as Onoda at different phases of his life is nothing short of miraculous, but Issey Ogata might be even better as an old mentor who’s the key to break the other man out of his self-imposed belligerence into perpetuity. These thespians aid Harari in negotiating their characters as reflective of a broader truth about fascistic indoctrination and the cultural context of Imperial Japan, dilemmas of self-effacement and subservient paranoia, without turning them into symbols bereft of personhood.
Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle is streaming on Kanopy. You can also rent or purchase it on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.
R.M.N. (2022) Cristian Mungiu
Every election cycle, one of the most frustrating phenomena in Portuguese politics is the right-wing lean of the migrant diaspora. Those who left the country in hopes of better lives, who settled in richer nations and often suffer under foreign anti-immigrant legislation, are overwhelmingly supportive of parties extoling xenophobic values and proposals. There’s no solidarity between immigrants, or perhaps no ability to go beyond one’s own self-interests to acknowledge how similar these international plights can be. This is, by no means, something exclusive to Portugal. In fact, it’s quite transversal across Europe’s poorest economies. Romania can be counted among those, and this dynamic makes for a fundamental tenet in Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N.
Set in December, around Christmas festivities and snowy vistas reminiscent of Bruegel, the film follows Matthias as he abandons his job in Germany and goes back home, to Transylvania. In the village, a web of interpersonal relationships and secrets unfolds, tapestry-like, as these small-town tales are prone to do. Yet, the biggest conflict comes from a factory, once central to the local economy, hiring foreign workers whom the community welcomes like a pack of raging beasts. Matthias is one of the intolerant. Through these plots, Mungiu turns the screen into a mural on themes of xenophobia, the impact of neoliberal policies dictated by powerful nations on their more vulnerable neighbors, Romanian identity, and an existential unrest that seems to emerge from the land itself.
Mungiu constructs R.M.N. with many of the same techniques he deployed in his other, more famous, feats like the Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and Two Days. The naturalistic performances are here, as is the extoling of Bazinian time through marathon-length long takes, the chilly formalism of compositions that remind us that, maybe, blocking isn’t a lost art after all. The town hall meeting, with almost the entire cast present in frame, makes for the most obvious artistic tour de force. However, I might be convinced the film’s conclusion beats it in audaciousness alone. Then, after so much bad blood has been spilled and nationalistic rhetoric screamed to the high heavens, Mungiu suggests that the land belongs to no man. It’s an unshakable conclusion, a break with New Romanian Cinema’s realism to grasp at a deeper truth.
R.M.N. is streaming on AMC+, Philo and Sundance Now. You can also rent or purchase it on Apple TV and Fandango at Home.
Any Palme bets or hunches among the readership? Will Park Chan-wook’s jury go for a consensus pick, or will it go for one of these polarizing auteurs?
Reader Comments (2)
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