This is not my favorite Ducournau movie, but I understand that there are some autobiographical and cultural reasons why this movie probably lands with a lot more impact with French cultural knowledge: the weird and unusual and vibrant setting of French North Africa in the heat of the HIV and AIDS epidemic, the depiction of Muslims and immigrants and in the midst of both the rise and fall of the daughter of France’s most venomous far right nationalist in a generation and the nascent war in the Middle East which has the world sleepwalking into the polycrisis. But what that looks like in practice is a lot of light body horror for anyone who couldn’t handle The Beauty but thought that they might be a little bit into Dr Who? But the movie is actually a lot more focused on, and this is spoiling a lot and nothing at the same time, the mysterious and conflicting relationship status of Amin over the course of the second and third acts. Like, what the actual fuck is going on there? And it’s such a slow burn for the insidious questions about his relationship to all the other characters to worm their way into your brain, because we get these scenes that kind of sneak up on you and seem kind of wholesome and sweet in the moment and then totally get re-written with each successive info dump we receive about a character. But there’s just so much and so little going down in this movie that I can’t endorse you spending too much time on this one without it being part of some explicit magical realist course on de-centered peoples rather than some good cannibal fun or autoerotic mess. Also, it seems as if the mom in this movie is somehow included in a viral gif of Emmanuel Macron being slapped by his wife on camera before leaving their jet.
