The Unknown

The director declines to get too specific about his allegorical intent, which could be sexual trauma or gender identity or just a mysterious body-snatcher nightmare. Either way, this is a spellbinding psychological puzzler led by a typically fearless performance from Léa Seydoux.

The Unknown reworks the body swap, a trope favoured by goofy romcoms, as elevated horror.

For better or worse, Harari uses gender dysphoria as a conduit to his more immediate concern: The idea that who we are is ultimately a memory that we share with ourselves.

The Unknown has the tough mission of turning a beguiling body-swap premise into an engaging, well-paced work in its own right, and casting is crucial to achieve such. With a Cannes mainstay like Léa Seydoux leading alongside an actor as versatile as Schneider, The Unknown earns its keep, for all the eerie undercurrents fueling its uneven narrative.

This one, sadly, is flawed by that perennial problem of how to end a story with a great premise.

In the art-house cinema of enigma, there’s often a thin line between the mysterious and the murky. Arthur Harari’s The Unknown treads this line with varying degrees of daring and discomfort, but ultimately never feels quite confident enough to lead us compellingly through the labyrinth of its bizarre body swap narrative.

Seydoux and Schneider, fine actors within the own right, are completely wasted, and are window dressing for one of the ineptest films made of the decade so far, that also borderlines on offensive as it wastes not only these actor’s talents, but the time of the audience watching them go through the motions for Harari’s satisfaction. As a film critic, I’ve never once walked out of a screening in my life, but The Unknown almost became that first title for me to do so as it became as pointless of an exercise I’ve seen in recent memory.