The Worst Ones

This is one of those movies that shows rather than tells—always preferable, even in the moments when the big picture is still coming into focus.

Luminously photographed and nimbly edited, The Worst Ones — which won the Un Certain Regard competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022 — offers a provocative critique of filmmaking practices. It also presents a subtle defense of the onscreen miracles revealed by the young and the raw.

Part of what makes The Worst Ones tick with a pace close to that of a thriller is its self-reflexive relationship to genre and knack for referentiality.

Akoka and Gueret split the difference, inviting the audience to consider the meta-ness of everything going on while really just making a compelling social-realist comedy about what happens when a film crew descends on a working-class town. That the filmmakers end up making the same film as Gabriel seems to be the point.

The Worst Ones is trying to be both a kind of documentary about its own making and a drama about a guy making another film. Unfortunately, the two don’t mesh.