May 2025 marks the seventy-eighth iteration of the Festival de Cannes. As a major exhibition and industry marketplace, Cannes has a massive presence in the international film festival circuit, with many regarding it as the superlative film festival. While this, in some regards, attenuates the presence of other early-year fests like Rotterdam, Sundance, and the Berlinale, Cannes is the undeniable mammoth of film festivals, for marketers and critics alike. As to be expected, this year boasts a bevy of newcomers with Akinola Davies Jr., Alexe Poukine, and Harry Lighton, along with veteran filmmakers like Julia Ducournau, Kelly Reichardt, and Jafar Panahi (this year’s Palme d’Or winner), who all gather on the luxurious southeastern French Riviera to celebrate and pontificate over a major slate of annual releases. Amidst the bustling red-carpet premieres around the Palais and the dense pedestrian traffic along the Croisette, an odd irony fills the coastal air, as the chic, luxurious ambiance of Cannes is contrasted with the ample socio-political issues presented within the theater halls, and in the heavily armed CRS police that patrol the streets. In this tense and intriguing milieu, the following collection of reviews prompts glimpses and insights into some of the more interesting releases at Cannes 2025.

Each year a mass of posters adorns the avenues of the coastal city. The illustrative artistry of these images is often just as admired as that of the annual selection. It may come as no surprise that national French fare is often privileged in this regard; and this year is no different, with image stills of Claude Lelouch’s Un homme et une femme (1966) littering various signposts and shop windows. But this year Cannes presents an unusual gesture in offering a double poster. The images evoke Lelouch’s iconic final sequence where Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée share an amorous embrace as the camera swirls euphorically around them. The posters for Cannes 2025 show each of their respective visages and their mutual jubilation at their moment of love’s confirmation. But these frames also suggest a different innate dichotomy that typifies the festival. For Cannes, complements and contradictions abound when comparing the main competition with parallel sections, film exhibition paired market conferences, and affluence and poverty sharing close quarters. This curious tension presents an interesting framework through which to distill this eclectic group of festival offerings, ranging greatly in content, genre, and ethos.

In Competition:

This year’s In Competition features a considerable selection of art films, historical dramas, and unexpected gems. From Oliver Laxe’s explosive tragedy through the heart of the Moroccan desert in Sirât and Lynne Ramsay’s cacophonous experimental meditation on post-partum depression in Die My Love, to Oliver Hermanus’s tender Americana drama History of Sound, Richard Linklater’s Right Bank milieu hangout film Nouvelle Vague, and Bi Gan’s sprawling, oneiric memorial to a cinema in Resurrection, the central fare of Cannes 2025 tenders a range of content from the humorous and nostalgic, to the bleak and bizarre.

Sound of Falling

One enigmatic, moving early entry from the main competition comes with Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling. This stirring and soporific sophomore feature links generational trauma through an array of young women and ancestors in a provincial German village, in the region of Altmark. Across four different time periods, Schilinski’s narrative floats cryptically through each era, without clear delineation, where the lineage between the various characters would appear more metaphorical than literal. The challenging nature of the film in its hazy narrative and quietly shocking material is rewarding for the patient viewer, and it presents an ostensible women’s issues film through the lens of art house intrigue, to demanding effect. As the first female German filmmaker to compete In Competition since Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann in 2016, Schilinski’s entry marks a powerful and provocative presence at Cannes. Later receiving the Jury Prize alongside Sirât, Sound of Falling stands as one of the most singular, memorable films of the festival.

Pervading themes of death envelop the Sound of Falling through several techniques and narrative conceits. In terms of Fabian Gamper’s camerawork, there is a spectral sensibility as the camera careens and drifts through the space of the film. A sense of voyeurism accompanies this, as the camera often peers through cracks and keyholes. While these visuals somewhat mimic the viewpoint of the curious children that scatter about in each period section, they also transcend that vantage into something confounding, yet formidable. To this effect, the production took inspiration from the photography of Francesca Woodman, as is apparent in much of the artistic framing. Death fantasies also populate the film in a number of instances: Alma (Hanna Heckt) replicates the photo blocking of a deceased sister; Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) projects herself lying next to a deer carcass in a tall grass field as the harvest machinery dares to swallow her; Kaya (Ninel Geiger) pretends to drown; and Nelly (Zoë Bayer) imagines rolling down a steep bank into the river—a clear allusion to the titular character in the final scene of Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967). Even Erika (Lea Drinda) leaps to her end beneath the wheels of a horse-drawn carriage. But the deaths (both imagined and real) that bind these characters are but one thread of generational trauma. The rest simmers in the lingering effects of incestuous desires, child abuse, and haunting flights to freedom which are captured eerily in two different photographs (comme Woodman).

The search for existential meaning amongst these echoing connections seems to more directly correlate to the original German title of the film, In die Sonne schauen [Staring at the sun]; whereas the English translation presented at the festival, denotes a darker sonic leitmotif that repeats throughout the film: crackling static and low frequent noise as an expressive “sound of falling,” or better yet, drowning. The centralization of death as auditory and visual techniques, title suggestions, and thematic concerns ground the story in its more nebulous and mysterious moments. While indebted to rich film history that would appear to draw from the works of Michael Haneke, Béla Tarr, and Andrei Tarkovsky, Schilinski charges forth with this obscure, transfixing project as an aesthetic, visceral meditation on death. And despite the sadness, deceit, and systemic harm that underlies Sound of Falling, its final sequence suggests something transcendent. An elevation beyond the fields and into the unknown. Like the Anna von Hausswolff song that also repeats throughout the film, “We are walking in a curved line into something new.”

Alpha

Palme d’Or winner Julia Durcournau returns to Cannes after taking home the top prize in 2021 with Titane. As an acolyte amongst the array of cinema du corps films to come out of France over the last two decades, Durcournau’s new project Alpha garnered much interest and intrigue, owing to the success of Titane and her vicious debut feature Raw (2016). Needless to say, the reception following the Cannes premiere of Alpha was muted, at best—echoing the downbeat tone of the film. Alpha is, at once, reasonably clear in its themes but meandering in its execution. Adjacent plot lines trail off and those that remain repeat to blunting effect, as Durcournau sifts through themes of addiction, death, epidemic panic, and grief. Described by distributors as her most personal film, Alpha’s ostensible shortcomings are apparent, compared to the more kinetic energy of her previous genre-centric body horror films. However, where credit is due, Durcournau is not exploring metamorphosis in quite the same way as Raw or Titane. The organic mutability of cannibal and metallic urges are here replaced with the body rendered in stone. This absence of mutation (which Durcournau confirms in the festival press conference), instead memorializes the dead, rather than interrogating corporeal latitudes of desire, progeny, and rampantly flourishing life. Here, the central notion of the uncanny is explored through viral presences of grief, fear, and memory.

Set in a parallel world of the 1990s, Alpha begins with the titular young character (Ambrine Trigo Ouaked) drawing lines between the puncture wounds of her addict uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim). In her drive to connect the dots of these wounds, Alpha seems to share in Durcournau’s intrigue in corporeal afflictions. Jumping ahead to her teenage years, we find a thirteen-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros) getting a DIY tattoo of a roughly sketched letter A on her left bicep. As we find our inebriated protagonists experience repetitive punctures to the skin, one realizes that this tattooed letter may hold another parallel beyond her name. This strong opening sequence, set to a Portishead track (also “Stranger[s]”), figuratively situates Alpha alongside her uncle. She too indulges in drugs (though not his penchant for heroin) and punctured flesh as a means of bodily curiosity and self-interrogation.  As with an adolescent metamorphosis allegorized by carnal desire in Raw, or posthuman intimacy with machinery and complex negotiations of parenthood in Titane, Alpha emphasizes corporeal fixations of the body as a catalyst for personal transformation. Moreover, these explorations beneath the skin are literally and figuratively a way to consider the lives of the characters, by way of empathy. However, Alpha differs from the demonstrative transformations experienced by Justine and Alexa, respectively; instead attending to Alpha’s confusion and grief in the death that surrounds her. For Alpha, her personal change is less literal and more ceremonial.

In the narrative, a viral stand-in for the AIDS epidemic scours the nation, turning the ill into stone—monuments for the dead. Alpha’s unconscious trauma from the death of her uncle compounds through various atemporal memories, thunderous nightmares, and mirrored affects of pain that echo from him to her. Obvious allegories of the AIDS epidemic abound here, as numerous hospitalized bodies (contagious only by intercourse or dirty needles) slowly turn to stone. A corporeal transformation where physical entities are returned to the earth. Quasi-apocalyptic landscapes seem to reinforce this point. Especially as Alpha, her mother (Golshifteh Farahani), and Tarim find themselves in a rust-colored storm—an aesthetic contrast to the cold, austere color grading apparent throughout the rest of the film. Covered in the detritus of Arim (and countless others) Alpha is compelled to face her grief, without ambivalence. Her distraught visage (the cover image of the Alpha) punctures this point.

The muted sense of melancholy that envelopes the film diverges greatly from the dynamic sensibilities that situate her previous work. While flashbacks in the film (the 1980s) are saturated more in color and evoke familial feelings of homogeneity, the present emphasizes desaturated white and blues, expressing a cold, metallic ambiance of separation. Fear has entrenched the nation, and the dead seem to amass in piles of dust in different pockets of the city. Their blood is no longer a threat, as Alpha’s is to her classmates. The infected bleed sand and absolve themselves of life—an antithetical charge against monotheistic notions of man created from dust. But elevating this material beyond a fatalistic perspective of illness and mourning is love as a mode of memorial. Alpha’s tattoo bears more than just her name, and the violence she experiences as her body cries out in blood is merely collateral to Durcournau’s interrogation of love. Leaving behind the generic conventions of her first two films, the director embraces what she directly considers to be a drama. Rendered through attributes of artistic cinematic expression (i.e., modes of art cinema) Durcournau seizes upon the notion of the uncanny. “The term of the uncanny is absolutely precise,” she says as her film instills love as an ethos of memory and mourning. And while Alpha will undoubtedly divide fans of her previous ventures, Durcournau propels the canon of cinema du corps, to not only provocate corporeal intensities and curiosities of the living but to honor the deceased and the love that reverberates, even after our bodies crumble and float on into the ether.

Sentimental Value

In ways distant to Durcournau, director Joachim Trier dials back the dynamism of his previous film, The Worst Person in the World (2021), presenting a slower-paced family drama centered around a trio of characters. Set once more in Trier’s favored city of Oslo, Sentimental Value begins with a beautiful montage of an old family home, as Nora Borg (Renate Reinsve) muses over her childhood memories with her younger sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) and their father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård). With an earnest touch of sensitivity in the dramaturgy of human moments, Trier breathes life into this domestic setting, sketching its histories and memories through a series of poetic musings from Reinsve. The sense of place within the film is so palpable and tactile as to evoke emotional sympathy for the Borg family, as they negotiate personal estrangement, professional insecurities, and how art as practice can be a profound mode of connecting with one another. While Agnes works as an academic historian and mother, she seems to maintain a consistent connection to their estranged father. Her connection to Gustav is anchored by her childhood performance in an unnamed masterpiece film that her father directed around twenty years prior. Facing a concern about his familial and artistic legacy, Gustav approaches Nora (with whom he has a more tenuous relationship) about starring in a new metatextual film about their family—apparently a masterwork, as well. Her rejection of his offer and her own professional unease as a theatre and television actor present a myriad of dramas in and about the old family home.

What Trier does so well in Sentimental Value, is that he finds a way of expressing an ethos of sentimentality that is grounded in earnest interactions and minor key exchanges. The conflicts of the narrative are never maudlin or affected, but rather insightful as mid-to-late adulthood becomes a site of self-inquiry, stepping ahead a few years in the life course alongside Reinsve. Elle Fanning gives a surprisingly adept supporting role of American movie star Rachel Kemp, who Gustav insists is the right fit for his script, with Nora in absentia. Feeling sensitive to cultural appropriation and genuine respect for Gustav’s artistic integrity, Rachel shows glowing maturity as she reconsiders her role in the project. Trier regular Anders Danielson Lie also makes a brief appearance as Nora’s co-star at the National Theatre and is electric in his fleeting moments onscreen. Anchored by the space of the old house, there is continuity and intimacy between the characters as they move through the life within and out of this space. Indeed, a key sense of emotionality further connects the different story threads. And as the central setting, the home is crucial in Trier’s film as it bears witness to life and how quickly it goes for the characters.

While not as aesthetically invigorating and moving as his strongest film, The Worst Person in the World, the year’s Grand Prix winner finds Trier more assured and measured in his work as director. The warmth of the story is buoyed by humorous moments in Nora’s wardrobe distress backstage or when Gustav blindly gifts his young grandson DVDs from Michael Haneke and Gaspar Noé. The cinephilic stubbornness of Gustav surely ebbs with the theatrical interests of his daughter, posing a contesting dynamic in which they both strive for better connections through their respective art. With this ethos of reconciliation, it would seem the trust in art and domesticity, from the evolving status of the household to the final production of the film within a film, are core themes of Sentimental Value. It is surely his most mature film, and like Skarsgård’s Gustav, who finds his deepest value when working with his family, Trier expresses the precarity of familial and romantic love through a confident sense of sentimentality within each of his works. The nineteen-minute standing ovation following the film’s premiere (one of the longest in Cannes history) is surely a testament to the sentimental values that imbue his work. While Sentimental Value may not have the urgency and exciting possibilities that define fan favorite, The Worst Person in the World, Trier says it best in his remarks to the press: “Tenderness is the new punk.”

Cinéma de la Plage:

A Hidden Life

For the past few years, annual anticipation of The Way of the Wind has held Cannes in sway, with many holding out hope for the unreleased project to be another late-career opus for Malick, like The Tree of Life. While his purported biblical epic remains in suspense, another crucial Malick film graced the Croisette on the opening night of the festival. Running in parallel with the Cannes Classics programming, the Cinéma de la Plage is an apt repertory series held by the Mediterranean seaside that offers plein air screenings, free for the fest-goers. An encouraging alternative to the deficit of available tickets in the early days of Cannes. While The Way of the Wind did not make it to Cannes this year, his most recent release A Hidden Life, was presented in this section as an unusual more-current repertory screening. But A Hidden Life is more than just a recent retrospective, or a polite nod to the general sense of eagerness for the director’s next project. In an era under threat from absurd autocrats and parasitic billionaires, this late-career masterwork is a quiet, resonant charge against the boisterous, damning voices that echo in our world today. For its inaugural evening, Cannes looks back to one of its other premieres (six years prior), giving providence and privilege to a sentiment that we all need in our lives today.

Beginning with a considerable selection of the Malick film, each festival evening the beachfront Cinéma de la Plage series offers first come, first serve viewings of classic retrospectives. An amiable option for festival goers, when the 7 am scramble to book tickets (four days in advance) proves challenging. The sandy open-air theatre, flanked by mega yachts on one side and the bustling Croisette on the other, provides reclining beach chairs and a cool night breeze to complement the searing sunny afternoons. From King Vidor and John Woo to John Schlesinger and François Leterrier, this year’s festival series presents an amiable repertory to offset the rush of competitive screenings that sweep the early days of Cannes.

Quinzaine des Cinéastes:

La Quinzaine des Cinéastes/Director’s Fortnight also issues an intriguing mix of reputable French fare, retrospectives, and directorial debuts. Replete with an abstract cover art of some beachfront bunnies(?) illustrated by Harmony Korine, this parallel program presents some added diversity to the more official competition.

Enzo

Robin Campillo’s Queer drama Enzo kicked off the annual curation with a script penned by his long-term collaborator, the late Laurent Cantet, who received an honorary directorial credit. Campillo’s project (as he readily admits) would likely have been a much different project under the helm of Cantet, and the pacing echoes more of his own feature debut of Les Revenants (2004), than that propulsive energy of 120 battement par minute (2017). And while the film might be understated to a fault, it does nimbly deal with issues of male intimacy (among family, peers, and potential partners), while prompting questions of teenhood, not only in life but with one’s family. The titular Enzo (Eloy Pohu) embodies this with many characteristics, in that he is at once listless, uninspired, and stubborn, while also introspective, artistic, and romantic. While perhaps not as strong as his previous works, Campillo’s Enzo honors the legacy of Laurent Cantet, while also bringing a homoerotic multidimensional perspective to the effects of adolescent awakening. If the film is plodding and diluted in its drama, surely this echoes the fleeting feelings that all teenagers experience: uncertainty in direction; unexpected interests; and a simultaneous embrace/rebellion against the social milieu of familial expectation. While not Campillo’s strongest effort, it does harbor an underlying, perceptive insight into aspirations and ambiguities of adolescent selfhood. The need to define and reinvent oneself.

I’m Not There

Another notable screening in the Director’s Fortnight also returns to this theme of indeterminate selfhood. While at Cannes to receive the Carrosse d’Or, Todd Haynes hosted a retrospective of his perfectly pretentious masterpiece I’m Not There (2007). In an extended post-screening panel, the director spoke of resonant childhood cinematic experiences, artistic sensibilities, cinephilic citations, and a memorable anecdote of Bob Dylan granting the production life rights to his entire music catalog—in capricious, generous move from the iconic musician. Haynes’ magnificent and diffuse take on the persona of Dylan undertakes a litany of Americana perspectives, pop cultural references, and mythic qualities in order to study what Haynes deems as the American drive to constantly reinvent oneself. As the superior art film version of recent Bob Dylan musical dramas (Haynes has admittedly avoided viewing the recent James Mangold biopic), I’m Not There serves as a sui generis example of identity crisis through confrontation, citation, and experimentation of selfhood. In this, Cannes once again proves formidable not only for its debuts but also in its repertory queue of content.

The President’s Cake

Another major film that went on to receive both the Director’s Fortnight Audience Award and the Camera d’Or is Hasan Hadi’s 1990s child-centric drama The President’s Cake. The President’s Cake (produced by Chris Columbus) stands as one of the more unexpected gems and well-received debuts of Cannes and is an exceptional example of parallel section content that stands strong, alongside the In Competition fare. As a rare Iraqi selection for the festival, Hadi’s directorial debut follows the travails of two children Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) and Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem)—along with one particularly charismatic rooster named Hindi—as they are tasked by their domineering schoolteacher with collecting ingredients to make a ceremonial cake for Saddam Hussein’s birthday. Political critique on the economic disparity between the Hussein regime and the impoverished children is readily apparent, although Hadi is careful to state that he had no overt political intentions in making the film. Drawing from his own childhood experiences, he simply sought to emphasize a story from the child’s perspective. Still, the social criticism is undeniable as the children are inundated with propaganda at school and must venture from their riverside village to the city, hawking cheap personal items and stealing just to complete their errands, or face violent consequences from their teacher, and by extension, the regime. As they scour the city for ingredients, they encounter both threats and aid from different adults, presenting a more complex portrait of early 1990s Iraq. Faith in community rings true as the villagers ultimately band together to provide Lamia with materials for the cake. Though, the final scene upends the apparently happy denouement, as the children are shaken by the reality of war when a bomb explodes just outside of the school. As Lamia and Saeed duck for cover, they stare into each other’s eyes under the pretense of a blinking game. Effectively, offering confidence and community in one another, as they continue to endure afflictions of war and the striking realities of a nation under autocratic rule.

Un Certain Regard:

The Plague

Charlie Polinger’s film The Plague arrived as another unexpected gem of the festival. Produced by and co-starring Joel Edgerton, The Plague follows a group of preadolescent boys training in water polo at an American summer sports camp. Within this rowdy coterie of preteens, the popular Jake (Kayo Martin) resides as their de facto leader. Confident and, at times, emotionally attuned to others, Jake is ultimately the source of rampant bullying, especially directed at the neurodivergent Eli (Kenny Rasmussen). However, it is our protagonist Ben (Everett Blunck) who struggles to navigate the social pressures of the camp and whose flustered anxieties around authenticity reach a peak where he, in turn, embodies the bullying that he is so desperate to avoid.

The Plague harbors some rather interesting cinematography, especially the underwater sequences, which range from foreboding to ballet-esqe. But it isn’t the only insurgent water-based narrative, as we will see below. Teetering on the edge of psychological horror, Polinger’s formidable directorial debut initially attracted the attention of Edgerton, who first desired a role as director, later conceding to Polinger. Edgerton’s continued involvement as producer/actor nevertheless maintains a conviction in the project as it probes the inequities and liabilities of young social conflicts. As the film builds to an instance of grotesque self-inflicted violence, Polinger is keen to conclude with an instance of sympathetic reverie. As Ben returns to the dance social in the final sequence of the film, he honors Eli’s eccentricities, while embracing himself, despite having “the plague.” In a dizzying, albeit euphoric charge of dance, Ben momentarily transcends his social pressures, embracing his authenticity as an act of declarative freedom.

The Chronology of Water

The presence of water holds an integral value for another formidable selection in the Un Certain Regard. Likely the most provocative and divisive film of Cannes comes in the dissonant, luminous directorial debut from Kristen Stewart, The Chronology of Water. Stewart’s longstanding interest in adapting Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of the same name mirrors the troubling kinetic content expressed in her lucid autobiography. The formal poetics of the film are expressed through a bevy of visceral, formal devices in its disorienting framing and cutting. Heightened diegetic sound magnifies one’s attention to the minutiae of an intensified environment, whereas constellations of extreme close-ups dissect the corporeal forms onscreen, disassembling states of clarity and being. Stewart’s pervasive use of intensified continuity offers a distinctive montage aesthetic, that may bring to mind a similar editing design in Malick’s “Weightless Trilogy,” with films like Song to Song and Knight of Cups. However, this montage device which presents both a memory aesthetic and an expression of a tumultuous life, perhaps, better resembles Upstream Color (2013). In contrast to the problematic paratextual details surrounding Shane Carruth’s project (a film also said to resemble Malick), Stewart’s experimental drama interrogates the pleasures and horrors of a singular feminine experience, with incisive empathy and critical love for her character, rendered with wrought candor by Imogen Poots.

Bearing some resemblance to Lynne Ramsay’s Cannes premiere Die My Love—which also effects desperations of a damaged psyche through a litany of primal urges and characters grasping for meaning—The Chronology of Water details a prism of complex psychologies stirring around issues of substance abuse, agitated modes of sexual desire, and dispositions of motherhood that inspires both love and tremendous emotional turbulence. While Jennifer Lawrence and Poots (in their respective films) both imbibe alcoholic liquids in desperate attempts to mute their distresses, Stewart looks to liquid for an array of other artistic resonances. In her film, complex themes of water offer refuge for Lidia in swimming, while more corporeal liquids of tears, blood, and cum situate traumas of pleasures of Lidia’s conflicted chronology of experiences. Her verve for self-destruction, in response to childhood abuse, is countered with a deep love for poetry and swimming, where she finds fleeting passage away from the ills of the world. To this, she aptly muses how, “In water, like in books, you can leave your life.” Through the presence of water and conduits of writing, she resolves some measure of peace by the film’s end.

As an adjacent section to Cannes’ official selection, Un Certain Regard privileges unusual and eclectic stories of regard, with a partial bent towards directorial debuts. Another actor-turned-director worth acknowledging is Harris Dickinson, for his sympathetic social drama on addiction, homelessness, and rehabilitation in Urchin. Nevertheless, The Chronology of Water stands as the exemplary film in this section. Stewart’s blistering debut will surely prompt divisive discourse on its aggressive art film aesthetics, challenging violent and sexual material, and close lens on the topic of trauma. But for all its experiments and deliberate provocations, the film finds itself grounded in deep, personal meaning; more so than the comparative Ramsay film. For the keen eye, these delirious qualities of the film work to magnificent effect, and for her efforts, Stewart formulates a difficult, resonant account of an interior life, contextualized by metaphorical associations with water. Despite the difficulties of viewer engagement and mature content, The Chronology of Water is one of the most rewarding films of the festival.

Eddington

As this journalist returns from the Riviera to the United States (with much hesitation), perhaps it is most fitting to end with some thoughts on another divisive film the festival, Ari Aster’s Eddington. As critic Thomas Flight shares, Eddington’s Americana lunacy brings the absurdist realities of American COVID-era insanity and lunacy into sharp relief. Aster’s foray away from the realm of generic horror and into a mode of the absurdist Western tragedy delivers a retching reminder of the simmering dangers of the American psyche. As expressed by the film’s logline, such warring ideologies and differing understandings of reality constantly threaten a powder keg of consequences. Neighbor contending against neighbor, is very much an apparent reality of national life beyond the film, as Trump-era America (during COVID-19 and again now) embodies an existential threat of media authenticity where no one can agree on what is real anymore. Aster’s attempt at exposing these contentious factions (both so easily prone to social media influence and isolation) is admittedly of concern, as its satirical ending seems to oddly embrace the appropriative discourse of right-leaning rhetoric. While this may not be Aster’s intention, the film remains a vivid concern amidst a host of obfuscated realities vying for truth in a contemporary ludicrous America, teetering on the edge of fascism. Based on immediate conversations with other journalists, this seems to be the general consensus for many European audiences, while American critics, more or less, found the film to be a wry reminder of their own personal anxieties amidst the pandemic.

As Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl) resists a regime of propaganda in A Hidden Life, Aster eschews the pastoralist sentiments expressed in the Malick film, in favor of his own biting brand of social commentary, where sincerity can so easily lead into misguided “realities,” and spill over into capricious acts of violence and tragedy. As Eddington confronts the rhetoric of warring political perspectives, screen culture addictions, vulnerabilities to conspiracy, and an idealist dream of America haunted by its own histories, the U.S. remains ever precarious as the fantasies of reality in Aster’s film lie on the brink of actual possibility. While the isolationism of the contemporary American zeitgeist generates such lived states of fear for both conservative apologists and citizens under threat from current executive efforts to undermine the Constitution, sometimes the instinctual retreat towards hope is all that we can offer. As the real Jägerstätter embraced God in the face of fascism, we Americans too must resist the fear that debilitates us. Pedro Pascal candidly shares this feeling of unease during a mid-festival press conference: “Fuck the people that try and make you scared…and fight back. This is a perfect way to do so in telling stories…and don’t let them win.” The journalist who prompted this response had implored the cast to share their fears about the future of gathering spaces for film exhibition and discourse, where these days some Canadians even hesitate to cross the border. To this, Aster himself shares how Eddington presents a dangerous mood of irony regarding itself, and how “we need to engage with each other. That’s the only hope.” Whether or not this thesis is clear in his film, Aster seems sure that the need for reengagement, over isolationism, is a partial means of pacifying the failing experiment of America.

As the site of the world’s largest film festival, Cannes endeavors to be this space of community, as a key meeting ground for film expression, conversation, and critique. Through the fiction of cinema, we may attempt to better grasp our hopes, fears, and dreams of a better world. Perhaps, one day, we won’t need films like Eddington anymore—stories of tragic communities erupting into untethered realities, to a point of no return. For now, we can hope that art, in its multitudinous modes, platforms, and aspirations, can keep us engaged with our immediate and global community. Like the final moment of Un homme et une femme, we dream of a warm embrace. Where fears give way to love.

Volume 29, Issue 3-5 / May 2025 Festival Reports   cannes film festival   covid   french cinema