Loosely inspired by a graphic novel co-authored with his brother Lucas Harari, Arthur Harari’s latest feature sees a depressed Parisian photographer undergo a distressing transformation after meeting a woman at a masquerade party. David Zimmerman (Niels Schneider) spends his time photographing the suburbs in a continuation of a project started by his father before his suicide. He’s emotionally unavailable, which recently led to a painful break-up, with his ex-girlfriend about to relocate to Mexico – but after being dragged to a party by his friends, he ends up having sex with a stranger (Lea Seydoux) and wakes up to find his consciousness in her body. Panic stricken, he sets out to try and uncover what’s happened, but answers are frustratingly hard to come by.
Arthur Harari received praise for his role as the co-writer of his wife Justine Trier’s Anatomy of a Fall, but the intricate plotting and cutting dialogue of that courtroom drama is nowhere to be seen here. The Unknown is a much sparser script, with David practically monosyllabic for at least the first 40-minutes of a stretched 139-minute runtime. His transformation into a female body is understandably harrowing for David – he examines his new physique with a look of horror and always dresses in nondescript baggy clothes as if he’s hiding. It’s easy to see the film as a trans allegory – being stuck in a body that feels alien and being unable to access the means to achieve gender confirmation – but The Unknown is too opaque and flimsy to really interrogate this, aside from a scene late in the film where the new person residing in David’s old body envisions a reunion with their father (a wonderful cameo by Radu Jude of all people!).
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The film’s recurring dramatic piano sting motif is comically overused to underscore the sense of fear and dread that the central characters feel post-transformation, while Paris itself appears anonymous and dreary – David’s repeatedly referenced photography project is an obvious parallel to the main theme of changes we can accept and changes we can’t, but it feels poorly integrated given two sections of the film take place outside of the French capital, and when in the city, David (in both bodies) spends most of his time sequestered in his apartment looking for answers on Google and Reddit. The film’s intriguing premise is completely underserved by its oblique script – while The Unknown could absolutely retain its central mystery (the how and why) if there was a better sense of its tangible and mental ramifications for David and the other afflicted, there’s just not enough in the way of characterisation to balance the sparsity on display.
