Arthur Harari’s ‘The Unknown’ premieres at Cannes with Léa Seydoux, igniting debate over its identity themes, horror undertones, and elusive mystery.
Léa Seydoux’s first Cannes conversation for Arthur Harari’s new film is already shaping up to be anything but calm.. With “The Unknown” entering the festival competition on May 18. the project is drawing attention not just for its stars and genre shift. but for the way it refuses to settle into a single. comforting interpretation—an approach Harari seems to have built on purpose.
At 45. the filmmaker behind the new title arrives with a credentials file that. on paper. should make him instantly legible: an Oscar. two Césars. and a growing international profile.. Yet Harari has cultivated a different kind of visibility—one that comes indirectly. and that he describes as fitting his own working philosophy.. In his view. recognition can be enjoyed without turning the process into a checklist of what’s expected to “get there. ” a mindset that returns in how he talks about the film itself.
Harari’s recent momentum includes the 2021 breakout “Onoda: 10. 000 Nights in the Jungle. ” a nearly three-hour work shot in Japanese and built as an epic that he framed through the stylistic lens of John Ford.. The story follows a Japanese holdout who keeps fighting privately for decades after WWII ends.. The film first screened in Un Certain Regard and later earned a César for Best Original Screenplay.. Two years after that entry. Harari returned to Cannes again—this time in multiple capacities—serving as co-lead of the Directors’ Fortnight opener “The Goldman Case. ” and as co-writer of Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall. ” before “The Unknown” becomes his latest kind of reintroduction.
In “The Unknown. ” Harari adapts a graphic novel he wrote with his brother Lucas. and the opening establishes an identity premise that quickly becomes physical.. David. a Jewish Frenchman raised in the Paris suburbs who has a strong interest in visual art. is played by Niels Schneider—only for him to become “almost unrecognizable” as the story destabilizes his sense of self.. After an intimate encounter that remains deliberately unglamorous. minds and consciousnesses switch. and David wakes the next morning inside the body of a woman. portrayed by Léa Seydoux.
Harari positions the body switch as a direct mirror for the film’s obsession: identity.. Rather than treating the premise as a purely intellectual exercise. he presents it as something closer to play—asking what it would mean to build a transformation “with a woman at the center. ” even while returning to themes that have long run through his work.. The film’s emotional pull is also rooted in personal geography.. He returns to the northern Paris suburb where he grew up. shaped by what he describes as a progressive. art-minded family atmosphere that feels reflected on screen.
Still, the filmmaker cautions against expecting straightforward confession.. He explains that the project didn’t begin as a sudden decision to share his story. but as his brother Lucas’s intimate obsession with the graphic novel—one Harari later absorbed and made his own.. He draws a comparison to how performance reveals an artist without copying the hand behind the original notes: like Glenn Gould playing Bach. cinema can disclose the maker through interpretation.. He even nods to the literary idea that “Madame Bovary” is inseparable from the identity of its author. reinforcing that “The Unknown” is personal even when it won’t lay out its feelings in a neat line.
Arthur Harari The Unknown Léa Seydoux Cannes debate film identity body swap horror