Snap judgments rule at Cannes, especially in an age of proliferating critics’ grids, timed standing ovations, and wall-to-wall awards punditry. But Arthur Harari’s mesmerizing The Unknown is a movie that works slowly, subcutaneously, on the viewer. No wonder that this highlight of the Competition was also one of its most divisive entries: the film cultivates a mood of creeping unease that lingers long after its haunting conclusion. 

David (Niels Schneider), a 40ish photographer working on a secretive project to document long-term changes in the streetscapes of the greater Paris region, hooks up one night at a party with a woman he seems to recognize (Léa Seydoux). The next morning, he realizes he now occupies her body, which—some sleuthing reveals—once belonged to a German actress named Eva. When David, in Eva’s body, eventually locates his former physical self, it turns out to be housing a young woman named Malia (Lilith Grasmug).  

Based on a 2024 graphic novel by Harari and his brother Lucas titled The Case of David Zimmerman—the English translation will be published this fall by Arsenal Pulp Press—The Unknown is notably uninterested in solving its implicit mysteries: how and why exactly the body swaps happen, how widespread the phenomenon may be, how it might be reversed, and so on. What emerges instead, as the film allows the implications of its outlandish premise to sink in, is an unnerving thought experiment about the utter strangeness of consciousness and embodiment.  

Harari, who previously directed Dark Inclusion (2016) and Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle (2021), was last at Cannes in 2023 as the co-writer of the Palme d’Or– and Academy Award–winning Anatomy of a Fall (2023), directed by his partner, Justine Triet. A couple of days after his premiere, Harari spoke to me about the ideas underpinning his new film, and why cinema is a medium uniquely suited to expressing them.

I was talking about your film with some friends last night, and when we tried recounting the narrative, we felt compelled to diagram what happened. [Shows Harari photos on phone]  

We actually had these kinds of diagrams in the film at one point—we shot them! 

Did the writing process involve a mapping out of the various narrative intricacies and possibilities? It’s a film that dares to be quite narratively open and opaque, and the ambiguity is sustained to the end. 

My aim wasn’t at all to bring confusion or ambiguity. What I wanted was something very simple that would, at the same time, provoke a feeling of vertigo. As I was writing, what came up was the idea of avoiding explanations. I felt that the characters would go through this experience in silence, and the film had to match that. There was a balance to find: not too opaque, but not too much explanation. I think this made the film more radical than I expected.

Was it a similar process with the graphic novel?

That’s precisely the difference between the graphic novel and the film. In the novel, there were more explanatory developments—or maybe I would say speculations, interpretations, attempts to approach explanations. This idea was at the heart of the writing for Anatomy of a Fall too: when you can’t explain or understand something, you try to approach the truth, and the more you try, the more confusion you create through words and explanations. Probably because we had done something like this in the graphic novel, I wanted to avoid it in the film, and I took the risk of not speculating too much. 

As I haven’t read the graphic novel, I’m wondering if there are any tonal differences. The film is quite anguished and unsettling, and as I’m sure you know, the best-known body-swap movies tend to be comedies. 

There was no comedy in the graphic novel either, but this tone probably comes from my obsession with making a realistic film. I didn’t want it to be a genre film. Even if something impossible was happening, I wanted it to be completely realistic all the way through. This also emerged in the editing—we shot scenes like the characters making drawings like those you showed me, but when we were editing, they didn’t make sense. The film tells you what it wants to be. You discover it when you see how the actors and the characters react to their bodies—bodies that they can’t recognize, that have been transformed. There was something else—something subjective and unsaid—and it didn’t match with explanations or diagrams or anything that would take us out of the subjectivity of this experience.

The question of realism is interesting. There’s an inherent realism with cinema—it’s an art of appearances that deals with the visible world. But your film forces an extra cognitive step in the viewer, where you’re always having to remind yourself that the character before your eyes is not who they appear to be, which creates a really interesting effect.

This is what I found fascinating when my brother first told me his idea for the story, and probably why I had the desire to turn it into a film. What we show, what we see, what we film is the phenomenon, the surface, the appearance. What is essential to us is unseen. I realized in making Onoda (and again, it’s always while making that I realize these things) that my purpose was to start from a distance, to be as far as possible from the character—ideologically, subjectively—and gradually get closer and closer, until we get inside. I really wanted the viewer to have this complete identification that doesn’t happen so easily in cinema.

It happens in literature, because with words, there is no boundary between the outside and the inside, the appearance and the essence. With words, you can go anywhere; you can get into the subjectivity of the material and the characters. Cinema has to find a way of reaching the interior. That takes time—the time and the depth of a narrative. You cannot start the film by being inside your character. This film is a way of questioning the paradox of cinema—the connection between what you see and what you know is there, what you are observing but cannot be seen.

I imagine you were aware of the potential of the premise to be read allegorically. The theme of gender dysphoria has come up regularly in reviews so far, but it’s also a film that refuses any single allegory. It’s also significant, for instance, that David is Jewish and Eva is German. Since multiple aspects of identity are at play, I’m curious how you thought through these allegorical possibilities. 

I always try to liberate the work from themes. For me, the power of a work of art is that it cannot be reduced to the subject it deals with. Here, of course, the topics are there, and what I see with this film is that it acts as a mirror. Depending on who holds the mirror, they perceive different things, and relate to different pieces that they collect throughout. If they are sensitive to the issue of trans identity, or Jewish identity, they might read those elements into it. A friend of mine with a Vietnamese background said that the film brought her back to what they say in Vietnam, that the soldiers of the war have come back as ghosts today. If a film is flat enough to be reduced to one reading, it’s not an allegory anymore. Maybe you would call it a symbol. What I find interesting is precisely a multiplicity of entrances for viewers.

Can you say a bit about the spectral presence of Bob Dylan that hangs over the film?

Dylan was there from the beginning: Zimmerman was the surname of the character in my brother’s novel, and I’ve listened to him forever—I still keep listening to him. Sometimes I depress myself: to what extent can I be colonized by my parents’ references? How come I listen to him even more than my parents do? I hope my daughters will listen to him less than I do. 

But this film deals with the past. You said “spectral,” and that’s exactly what it’s about. Whether it’s Dylan or Judaism or gender issues, these are the specters of the film, possible ways of relating to it. It’s only natural that the film is haunted, just as I am myself haunted. The character is haunted by his past, by disappearances and traces. That’s what I look for in cinema. I feel as if films are less and less haunted; they’re less rooted in a faraway past. Godard was always predicting the end of cinema, and I hope he was wrong. My feeling is that cinema always has to be renewed—we have to find new ways of narrating and making films—but I hope that it can still be haunted by something deeper and older. 

These must have been tricky performances for the lead actors, who are each in a sense portraying two people at once: someone trapped in a physical body that is not theirs. Léa Seydoux has talked about having a newly postpartum body during the shoot, and Niels Schneider is barely recognizable, gaunt and much thinner than he usually is. Was it important that your actors be in some sense physically transformed?

It was important in the end, but I didn’t plan it that way. I knew I would make the film with Léa, and when she told me she was pregnant and would have just given birth when we shot, we decided to go with it. I realized that it was brilliant for the film: having her body transformed was very interesting. Filming the same actors in the same way, with the same body, the same face, is partly what makes me wary of working with famous actors. So for Léa, it came about naturally.

As for Niels, when I cast him, he was already thinner than usual, and he decided that he wanted to push this further, to be able to relate to his character. He couldn’t imagine how to embody a young woman with his usual way of being, acting, looking. We were careful because we didn’t want it to be one of these performance feats of an actor who transforms for a role. Actors always face the challenge of make-believe—some of them think they have to truly believe to perform and some say that performance is nothing but a mask. For the duality of these roles, this specific experience of not being in your own body, I think we needed the actors to feel this otherness, for their bodies and faces to be somewhat unknown to themselves.