The Unknown

From Viennale

In Arthur Harari’s gripping existential thriller, a mysterious entity steals people’s bodies through sexual intercourse, leaving their former selves trapped in the bodies of strangers. David (Niels Schneider), a depressed photographer continuing his father’s documentary work on urban development, is drawn into this inexplicable phenomenon after attending a carnival-themed party and hooking up with a German actress named Eva (Léa Seydoux). Now inhabiting her body, David attempts to make sense of what has happened, as the film turns its premise into an enquiry into memory, consciousness, embodiment and the gaze: an identity crisis that extends to the very possibility of identification. The title, an almost mathematical term that suits the film’s appetite for both understanding and openness, could be referring as much to Eva as the mysterious entity. Both remain elusive, forever out of reach. What matters instead are the shell-shocked people left in the wake of a traumatic encounter. As L’INCONNUE confronts the past, it lays out thematic threads, narrative levels, formal devices and cinematic memories in dizzying motion, gradually descending into the depths of the unconscious and conjuring continual new layers of existential dread. (Antoine Thirion)