“One of the best films of the year”

Playing in this year’s Toronto International Film Festival’s Special Presentations section is the latest film from up-and-coming French auteur Arthur Harari, The Unknown. Harari, known for writing the screenplays for films directed by his partner, Justine Triet, including the highly successful Anatomy of a Fall and Sibyl, had already proven his prowess as a director with his exceptional film Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle, which remains one of the best films of this decade. With The Unknown, Harari has somehow improved upon his prior film, creating a heavily layered and deeply absorbing work that is one of the best films of the year.

The film begins with David (Niels Schneider), a photographer who seems somewhat careless and lost in life. His main focus is a project he is working on, taking photographs of places in and around Paris that his grandfather and father photographed over the course of the last century. The eventual project will contain three sets of photographs for each location, showing how the places and the city have changed over time. The facades change, but something of the soul of each place remains, even as it hauntingly changes over time.

David probably parties a bit more than he should, and one evening he goes to a club where he spots a stranger from afar. The woman, Eva (Léa Seydoux), locks eyes with David and leads him away from the noise and lights of the nightclub. When David wakes up, he realizes he is no longer in his own body, but Eva’s. Naturally disturbed and confused, he attempts to figure out what has happened and how he can get his body back.

But Harari is much too intelligent to leave the film’s plot so bare, or to make it simply a body-swap story. What appears to be happening is that some person, or perhaps some kind of creature or demon, is transferring itself from one body to another and so-on. David’s body eventually has sex with the young Malia (Lillith Grasmug), who afterward assumes the inhabitation of David’s body. The more David tries to understand what is happening, the more mysterious the situation becomes. The creature responsible for the transformations may never be found, while the original person who inhabited Eva’s body never comes looking for it.

The Unknown is based on a graphic novel, L’Inconnue, by Harari and his brother Lucas and needless to say, the film is metaphorically deep. There are many ways to read the film, and none of them are necessarily wrong. Harari allows for a great deal of interpretation through the atmosphere and mystique he creates. The film raises questions about the human soul, society, the superficiality of the physical body, and how the soul is shaped by the body it inhabits. It also focuses on how other people perceive us, gender norms, the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases, and even the existence of evil in the world. 

The film is heavily atmospheric, which creates a lasting sense of dread. It immediately brought to mind Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, particularly in the latter half, but comparisons can also be made to the work of Michelangelo Antonioni, Jacques Rivette, and even David Lynch. The tremendous cinematography by Arthur Harari’s other brother, Tom Harari, allows this tense and dark atmosphere to thrive. This aligns perfectly with the feelings of darkness and evil in the film and also aligns with the characters’ fractured senses of self and reality. 

The performances by Seydoux and Schneider are towering and remarkable. Both are able to inhabit their bodies in ways that make the character transitions fully believable. Seydoux makes the transformation from Eva to David seem effortless, shifting between emotional conflict, remorse, and optimism. Schneider similarly portrays someone in a constant battle with his own existence and identity. They both give their minds and bodies to their performances which allows them to make the film what it is. 

In Onoda, Harari tells the story of a Japanese soldier who could not accept that World War II had ended and continued preparing to fight on a remote island for decades. He could not believe, or did not want to accept, that the world around him had really changed. In The Unknown, David has spent his life photographing the changing Paris, documenting how places transform over decades, yet when his own life is suddenly altered, he struggles to accept the change. In both films, Harari explores characters who are confronted with a new reality they don’t want to live in and must decide how to move forward. Because of this, both films are highly layered examinations of identity and psychological existence.

Walking out of the screening of The Unknown, I finally knew I had seen a masterful film playing at the Toronto International Film Festival. Up to this point, the festival had felt somewhat dull, with many films proving to be letdowns or outright disappointments. Only a few had reached the emotional or intellectual levels I had hoped for while remaining entirely engrossing. The Unknown does both. Every minute of its runtime remains engaging, and Harari never loses control of the film’s mystery or ideas. It is one of the most rewarding films of the year and continues Harari’s position as one of the most exciting and major filmmakers working today.