Out of the diamond-blue depths of the night sky over southern France, Jean Moulin parachutes down. By the time the film opens in 1943, the legendary French political figure and Resistance hero has already tasted his fair share of bitterness. Raised with a fierce aversion to nationalism and antisemitism, he has endured imprisonment, survived a failed suicide attempt, forged a fragile collaboration with Charles de Gaulle, and now, after years in exile, lands in a French swamp with a course for the capital.
Disguised as a decorator, he is tasked with setting the gears of the Resistance in motion under his leadership. Yet despite his natural pensiveness, hard-earned experience, and sharpened instinct — every sense attuned to the slightest rustle or suspicious glance beneath the upturned collars of men in trench coats — Moulin’s revolutionary rigor ultimately drives him toward fatality — right to the Gestapo’s claws. Even armed with masterfully imperturbable composure and a carefully fabricated alibi — at this point the Gestapo also has no knowledge of Moulin’s biography — the camera inevitably cuts from inside the truck to the closing iron gates. It becomes obvious that there will be no escape from here. In the films of László Nemes, it is widely understood that hope scarcely exists as a concept.
It is always somewhat unsettling to watch what follows after the world discovers a director who impresses everyone to death. Even more unsettling is seeing that director venture into a French-language film. This Hungarian filmmaker enters the 2026 Cannes main competition under just those conditions, only complicating them further. Ever since his debut Son of Saul (2015) was crowned with the status as one of the most staggering films about the Holocaust in history, audiences have demanded twice as much from the director, and, as a consequence, have subsequently grown disappointed with particular ferocity. If his next film Sunset (2018) was at least praised for the naïve mysteriousness it brought to the eve of the First World War, the one after it, Orphan, about a child waiting for his father after the war while trying either to recognize or reject his mother’s abusive lover, dramatically flopped at last year’s Venice.
Having gorged himself on the negative reviews from the Lido, Nemes leapt right into shooting his next feature in French. On paper it sounds like an accumulation of bad choices: from the eyeroll-inducing casting of omnipresent French actor Gilles Lellouche in the lead role to the opening logos of HBO Max and Disney+ — Nemes’ Moulin props up plenty of reasons to lower expectations for a new Nemes once again. Yet if Orphan inspired descriptions of Nemes’ recent direction as “empty but beautiful,” Moulin pushes those qualities toward a fascinating absolute — the former becoming almost scandalous in its obedience, the latter reaching a new level of authorial virtuosity.
Conventionality is both the film’s defining feature and, against all odds, its greatest strength. Moulin’s narrative development barrels straight toward hell with predictable linearity and underwhelming flatness. Where the exposition might have offered space to deepen the protagonist’s psychology and challenge the weight of his heroic aura, Nemes instead contents himself with rigid adherence to Moulin’s POV, teleporting his earned paranoia onto the screen with crucial help from Laetitia Pansanel’s music and Tamás Zányi’s sound design. The screenplay by Olivier Demangel, meanwhile, barely reaches the craft team’s level of mastery beyond a surface-level contextual introduction. But it seems like the film itself has no interest in such ambitions, and any expectation of something thematically groundbreaking evaporates within the first few scenes. The crux is that Moulin is so unmotivated to pretend to be anything greater that this self-awareness reads like the film’s own candid confession. Its decorative sophistication serves a likewise purely decorative narrative beneath it, and the picture is so flawlessly wrought that it is capable of placing one under the spell of its illusory enchantment.
Moulin is shot — and screened in Cannes — on 35mm by Nemes’ longtime cinematographer Mátyás Erdély, who saturates the film in poisonous yellow lamplight and masculine shadows that stretch through dark alleyways and amplify the suspense the screenplay itself cannot produce. Elsewhere, he stages fan-like homages to Jean-Pierre Melville: the camera lifts from a puddle to a looming silhouette, building pure noir mise-en-scènes that entertain exactly when the action subsides. The mastery of production designer Stéphane Rozenbaum crowns the entire action, as the environments are rendered with such realism and detail that they seem almost to step directly out of the archival footage of a bombed France that Nemes places before the opening credits. Obviously, none of this possesses any of the timeless quality associated with postwar French cinema or classical Hollywood. Moulin is instead a mummification of the past wrapped within its own time capsule, which in some ways recalls Sergei Loznitsa’s recent Two Prosecutors. But where that director’s film pursued its assured language of distance and stillness, Nemes is after spectacular experiments.
Inside the Gestapo’s purgatory, the German actor Lars Eidinger steps to the arena, and despite his naturally gentle typecasting, he delivers an acutely repulsive Nazi performance, excelling equally in playful interrogations and in descending into outright physical cruelty. Lellouche, meanwhile, gives everything the screenplay permits, portraying a gentlemanly gallantry that gradually collapses under the weight of unwavering partisan duty, reducing his presence to little more than a bodily vessel for liters of tears and blood — never forget some people might watch this Gestapo curiosa on Disney+. Here Nemes seems to sublimate all the violence he had previously refused to stage, reaching a cruelty that nearly earns the film the status of torture porn, as Nazis (quite literally) bite prisoners apart piece by piece in pursuit of the Resistance’s unbreakable secrets, restaging with inventive viciousness every imaginable horror that could occur against the concrete walls of a prison.
At its obvious climax, the film could have reflected on the cost and consequence of such deranged self-sacrifice in exchange for an idealistic belief in its global impact, though that likely would not have saved it. Perhaps its absence is what makes the film even a bit better. Moulin is hardly a (politically) necessary film, and it unconsciously continues to reveal the main competition’s obsession with outmoded genre cinema, much like James Gray did with Paper Tiger, which also opened with the “phenomenal” revelation that Russians with guns cannot be trusted. But if we are already content with a deficit of nuanced revelations of the past, offered instead a play with form alone, Moulin, for all its devotion to an illusory naïveté, deserves some respect. And if negative reviews do not discourage Nemes, perhaps he will arrive at something unconventional and essential for our poor present, because impeccable form, fortunately, he already possesses.
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