‘Parallel Tales’ and Farhadi’s Kieślowski Pivot

Asghar Farhadi’s ‘Parallel Tales’ premieres at Cannes, drawing comparisons to Kieślowski’s voyeurism—while its story choices fall flat for some critics.

A keen act of watching is at the heart of both “Parallel Tales” and the Kieślowski masterpiece it’s loosely echoing, but Asghar Farhadi’s take struggles to make that premise feel alive.

Loosely adapting the spirit of “A Short Film About Love” into a longer. more winding film. “Parallel Tales” moves like a meandering daydream that often feels cramped. tedious. and more concerned with its own cleverness than with the messy humanity voyeurism can reveal.. Like Krzysztof Kieślowski’s work. Farhadi’s story revolves around transgressive looking. yet the results are sharply different: where Kieślowski’s films trust the richness of what spying might uncover about us. Farhadi instead builds a flimsy house of mirrors that leaves many viewers wondering what it’s actually reflecting beyond the limits of its creator’s imagination.

The film’s trouble may start with how it holds onto its thriller framework.. For a viewer expecting forward motion. the experience can feel like enduring a story that’s constantly stalling—especially in moments built around star power.. Even when Isabelle Huppert appears. the sense of narrative momentum doesn’t really gather. making “Parallel Tales” the kind of movie that has viewers glancing ahead rather than leaning in.

At the center is Sylvie, a reclusive novelist of unclear standing, portrayed by Huppert.. Her inspiration doesn’t arrive through the usual creative channels; instead. she leans on a telescope as a substitute for imagination.. From there. her decision turns the act of watching into a form of authorship: she names a blonde sound engineer. “Anna. ” and treats the person she sees—working at a post studio across the street—as the muse for her latest book.. In Sylvie’s mind. Anna is married to a colleague named “Christophe. ” and the story she constructs adds an older boss. “Pierre. ” whose presence she imagines as the key to a hidden affair.

What makes this premise feel especially self-conscious is the film’s structure.. “Parallel Tales” brings Sylvie’s manuscript to life by staging different chapters of her writing across the first half of the movie.. These sequences are presented in semi-confounding first-person narration. and they’re visually separated from what’s framed as “reality” through a dour blue tint that drains the energy from scenes the script otherwise seems to struggle to energize.. Inside that design choice. Sylvie’s narrator appears to be spying on the apartment where she grew up—a place tied to a family rupture marked by her mother’s cheating. her father’s departure across the street. and his eventual jump to his death.

The film flirts with the idea that Sylvie may be drawing directly from personal experience. but it doesn’t confirm or deny it.. That ambiguity matters thematically: the story avoids collapsing the fiction into autobiography. insisting instead on a broader question—how reality can become a byproduct of the fantasies people project onto it.. Yet even with that intention, the movie doesn’t quite convert its darker scaffolding into lasting dramatic payoff.

Her manuscript, however, is treated as something close to worthless by the people who encounter it.. Sylvie’s editor. played by Catherine Deneuve. delivers a performance that underscores how little the work impresses—at least according to the film’s own framing.. When Sylvie laments that her stories come “from another time” and suggests that people no longer care about the kind of erotic mess her characters embody. the story moves quickly back into her daily routine: shuffling through a mice-ridden apartment and counting down until she’s due to move out.. It’s an opportunity for Huppert’s trademark intensity and scowling refusal to charm. but the screenplay leaves her with remarkably little else to do.

That changes when a strange young man enters Sylvie’s orbit.. Adam. played by Adam Bessa. is drawn in after he chases down a pickpocket who robs her niece on the Metro.. He’s eager to avoid another night in a shelter. and he agrees to help Sylvie with packing—yet the film treats his presence as a widening of Sylvie’s fiction rather than a new source of momentum.. Even in the moments when his character could bring friction. he’s described as an empty shell: a blank page without a developed past. ready to be filled.

Bessa’s Adam becomes more than a companion when he copies Sylvie’s book and internalizes it as his own.. From there. the film shows him inserting himself into the world of her story in an effort to spur events along—though the film doesn’t fully dramatize what pleasure. if any. he takes in the act of forcing his imagination onto others.. The result is that his obsession can feel inferred rather than experienced. leaving his most chilling behaviors harder to emotionally connect to.. As he stalks Anna—whose real name is Nita—his presence is framed as menacing and predatory. but the movie repeatedly fails to make the thrill of that compulsion feel concrete on screen.

Once Adam’s fiction starts to exert influence, the story turns into something like an escalating self-fulfilling prophecy.. Through a series of slow. heavy scenes. Nita and her coworkers become “incepted” by the power of Adam’s invented narrative.. The film also clarifies relationships that were first presented through Sylvie’s viewpoint: the character played by Vincent Cassel is in a relationship with Efira’s character. and Ninney is positioned as Cassel’s sniveling younger brother.. But the paranoia begins when Adam’s fiction nudges those connections into a new interpretation. and that small push is enough to set characters spiraling toward their doom.

The escalation takes a brutal turn.. With the same callousness the film shows toward mice breeding in Sylvie’s apartment. Adam begins to destroy the film workers across the street.. The movie. despite being directed with Farhadi’s typically controlled craft. doesn’t find the pleasure or tension that makes those narrative pivots land.. Even familiar genre ingredients—murders. ghosts. and the layered spectacle of people spying on people who are spying on people—don’t ignite the suspense they might in a more tightly engineered story.

Farhadi’s direction has a distinct signature, though the film’s strongest moments emerge when it focuses on sound.. The movie separates what Sylvie and Adam see through their telescope from the sonic experience surrounding them. and that craft choice gives the film a rare flicker of clarity.. Even so. the attention can feel excessive: there are stretches where the soundtrack work asks for time to watch characters re-create birds flapping their wings or lions clawing their way across the savannah. like post-production labor on a nature documentary that feels generic.. Still. those instances reinforce the film’s underlying idea—that reality can be piecemeal. and that meaning only clicks together in the mind doing the looking.

Ultimately. “Parallel Tales” argues. in its own way. that people continuously manufacture stories about the world—and that many of those everyday fictions are more interesting and believable than the one the film chooses to share.. For some. the film’s ambition doesn’t compensate for how often it loses steam. leaving the Kieślowski-style themes of voyeurism present in form. but not fully in spirit.

“Parallel Tales” premiered in Competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

Meta notes on reception aside, the question it leaves hanging is simple: when watching becomes writing, what exactly changes—truth, people, or just the stories we tell ourselves about them? In this case, the answer may depend on how willing you are to sit inside the film’s muted mirror.

Asghar Farhadi Parallel Tales Isabelle Huppert Adam Bessa Catherine Deneuve Cannes Film Festival Kieślowski adaptation