A suspicious disappearance of a teenage girl in a small town on the Côte d’Azur sends a young woman searching and spiraling in the Cartesian truth drama Affection Affection. It’s the winter season, and the picturesque little town is troubled by minor mysteries, from a missing white puppy to a disturbing mine explosion on the beach. But Géraldine (Agathe Bonitzer) seems to be the only one truly concerned. She works at the office of town mayor Jérôme (Christophe Paou), soon revealed as her romantic partner and father of the 17-year-old Kenza (Clémentine Kaul-Surdez). Things become more alarming when her stepdaughter disappears on her birthday, just as Géraldine’s absentee mother Rita (Nathalie Richard) returns to town after nearly two decades of living in Thailand. Géraldine told teenagers run away at least once, but she isn’t convinced. What sort of secrets does this village keep under wraps? Why did her mother decide to come back? Is she lonely or terminally ill?
Conflicting narratives and morbid conspiracy theories follow as Géraldine plays detective and pursues some leads on Kenza’s whereabouts, exacerbated by Jérôme’s subsequent disappearance, with little help from an indifferent cop who keeps asking her to bring a letter to someone he courts. The more the protagonist rolls with every development, the more Affection Affection becomes beguilingly strange and slippery, operating within the same register as many an Alain Guiraudie movie. Naturally, there are detours and unexpected encounters, including a visit to a long-unseen friend that later involves a foursome.
Following their previous collaboration in 2018’s Blonde Animals, Affection Affection is the second feature by the filmmaking duo of Maxime Matray and Alexia Walther. Their film is a character study, albeit loosely. Never the people-pleaser, Géraldine learns more about herself and the relationships she sustains than the case she’s trying to solve, though eventually it snaps into focus. “I think she exists in you,” a stranger, claiming to sense a person’s aura, tells her. “You are the 17-year-old teenager.”
The sparse story works itself out through double meanings, symbolism, and repetitions. No matter how misleading the clues are, they seem to overlap, gesturing toward the same, still-shrouded thing that gives this otherwise ordinary village its sinister sheen. The signs are there, if one looks just a little bit closer and deeper. “This is the way the world ends,” declares the graffiti on the wall of Jérôme’s neighbors, which he keeps fretting over. There is a scarecrow in a full suit mistaken for somebody’s other self. There is tarot talk about The Hanged Man, just as the head of a statue is found hurled into a pool. In this way, Affection Affection often feels fascinatingly metaphysical and somehow out of time, mirrored by a Micha Vanony score that is enigmatically elemental. The film’s aesthetic, meanwhile, is exceptional in its muted appeal, taking full advantage of the French Riviera’s sun-drenched beauty, from beautiful villas overlooking the open sea to seemingly enchanted terrains that echo the film’s ambiguous power, though some images admittedly contribute little more than the general sense of mysticism.
At its most potent, Affection Affection offers a compelling talking picture, where characters often eavesdrop and chime in without warning or as they please, where explicit references to T.S. Eliot casually make their way into a conversation, where humor is dryly appealing, and where one thing might mean something else entirely. “I don’t trust figurative meanings,” says Géraldine at one point. There is, of course, an attempt at the philosophical here, but Matray and Walther never allow the work to be weighed down by it — just enough so to give their project a little more texture. The French duo fashions a film that evokes a withdrawn but nevertheless gripping sensibility about the absurdities of truth, memory, and human connections. If you’re not entirely sure you understand everything, well, as the film articulates, you don’t exactly need to.
Published as part of Rendez-vous with French Cinema 2026.
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