Writers: Arthur Harari, Lucas Harari, and Vincent Poymiro
Director: Arthur Harari
Gender dysphoria meets Kafkaesque nightmare in Arthur Harari’s intriguing but half-formed allegory The Unknown (L’Inconnue) – a bizarre, unsettling spin on doppelgänger horror featuring an understated performance from Léa Seydoux.
Niels Schneider plays David Zimmerman, a fragile, sensitive photographer in his late 30s whose quiet obsession with a female stranger becomes the catalyst for a disquieting shift. While taking photos at an event, he becomes smitten with a woman called Eva (Seydoux) working among the waitstaff, later discovering her in the background of his negatives. When he spots her again in the crowd at a fancy-dress party, their encounter leads to a consensual but awkward liaison – a moment whose literal climax seems to trigger a body swap, causing David to wake up the next morning trapped inside Eva’s form. Notably, there is no physical horror in the transformation itself; rather than revelling in fleshy mutations, the characters simply wake up changed. Rendered through Tom Harari’s crisp, desaturated cinematography, sensationalism is stripped away, leaving no room for fantastical spectacle or Cronenbergian body horror. It is all told in a very matter-of-fact way, carrying a flavour of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis or Dostoevsky’s The Double in its mundane surrealism.
Initially suspecting a hallucination or a case of reincarnation, David eventually tracks down his original physical form – believing it to be inhabited by Eva. There is an amusing moment when David – now presenting as Eva – claims to be her twin, only for someone to point out that they do not have the same accent. The pair soon start working together to see if they can reverse this nightmarish switch, and the plot begins to resemble a mystery procedural as they attempt to uncover what has happened to them, even putting out an ad for others who have experienced the same phenomenon.
The arrival of a third character, Malia (Lilith Grasmug), complicates their unusual double act, leading to one of the most peculiar sex scenes in recent memory – a moment that feels disembodied, absurd, and tragic in its spectacular strangeness and disorientation surrounding gender and identity. Sex itself is largely de-eroticised here, reduced to guttural, almost horrifying groans, becoming less an expression of intimacy than another mechanism of this uncanny exchange.
Cinematic allusions abound, recalling Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in flashbacks to David’s obsession with Eva and, more explicitly, David Hemmings’ beleaguered fashion photographer in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, who similarly embarked on an existential quest around slippery identities. It is Antonioni’s studies of urban alienation and dislocation of self that hang heavy on the film, heralded by random still frames from David’s portfolio depicting dilapidated, empty environments – visual markers of what has been missing, which mirror the characters’ growing estrangement from their own physical selves.
The atmosphere never rises beyond dour and claustrophobic, becoming as oppressive as being trapped in an unrecognisable skin. Andrea Poggio’s minimalist score reinforces this isolation, giving the proceedings a persistent sense of suspended threat. A striking dream sequence involving two Léa Seydouxes offers a rare moment of disturbing visual extravagance.
The ever-impressive Seydoux is equally matched by Schneider, as both adapt and mould their mannerisms to fit their displaced identities. In particular, Harari—adapting from Le cas David Zimmerman, the graphic novel co-written with his brother Lucas Harari and scripted alongside Vincent Poymiro—draws on his lead actors’ innate expressiveness to convey emotional crisis through silence and gesture, repeatedly bringing the camera in close to capture moments of profound psychological distress. The great Romanian director Radu Jude also makes an unexpected but affecting appearance as Malia’s father.
Ultimately, the film is less concerned with explaining the mechanics of its central transformation than with creating an atmosphere of displacement and dread. Though it buckles under its own heavy-handedness and the pacing falters towards the climax, rare moments of levity offer much-needed relief from the solemnity. For all its shortcomings, Harari’s film prioritises psychology over fantasy, remaining an intriguing, if overly literal, metaphorical exploration of gender identity and bodily autonomy.
The Unknown is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2026 from 7-18 October.
