László Nemes began his career on a mountaintop that he’s struggled to scale ever since. Son of Saul was the rare first film that not only premiered in competition at Cannes but took home the Grand Prix (the first ever debut to do so) and carried influence all the way to the Academy Awards nine months later, where Nemes won the Oscar for Best International Feature. That doesn’t mean his successive projects have been poorly made, but even under consistently muscular writing and direction, they haven’t found their audiences. It’s not a mystery as to why. Moulin marks the Hungarian auteur’s most plot-driven film date, and one that, despite strengths, is still unlikely to find much of an audience.
Nemes—who came out as a staunch Zionist after Jonathan Glazer denounced Israel’s Gaza genocide during his Oscar speech for The Zone of Interest in 2024—thinks that’s a discrimination thing. He believes “there’s an absolute, shameless orgy of antisemitism overtaking the west” and his last film Orphan was denied U.S. distribution as a result of “anti-humanist regression” that has cast “the Jew as the internal enemy of the west” at the same level of “European anti-semitism before the takeover of the [Nazi] party.” In reality, it’s because most of his movies are singularly mystifying enigmas that leave a small few raving and most everyone else frustrated with the impenetrability of it all. At times, said inexplicability is what makes Nemes great. At others, it’s his downfall for selling a movie to wider audiences.
While the auteur firebrand has little, if anything, to stand on in his scathing comments about Glazer, Gaza, and the industry today, there’s an immense irony in Nemes saying Glazer “should’ve stayed silent” while being upset that interviews about Moulin have focused on his comments instead of the film—such narrow-minded cause seems to have kicked his ass into gear. In the first ten years of his career, Nemes only made two features, the latter of which, Sunset, barely registered when it arrived in 2018. In the past two years, since Glazer’s comments, Nemes has cranked out another pair of features, one that focused on Hungarian Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and Moulin, which follows the operations of the Jewish-French Resistance in occupied Vichy France.
Nemes’ second title in Cannes competition (his sophomore and third features bowed quietly at Venice) is a heavy, brooding, slow burn of a WWII thriller that tells the true story of the leader of the French Resistance, Jean Moulin (Gilles Lellouche), aka Max, as he works in secret to unify the group under de Gaulle, only to be captured by the SS, who suspect him their foe. As the poster depicts and cinematographer Mátyás Erdély gorgeously captures on 35mm, Moulin is a mix of glowing-bright and swallowing-dark frames, the former rendered almost blinding in contrast with the latter, both holding their place in the dichotomy of a story that it feels could go either way at any point.
In Moulin, the Gestapo runs as rampant as rats in New York City. From a fantastically suspenseful first sequence—drowning in the mysterious penumbra of the night in rural French fields where high-ranking, parachuting Resistance members land from the planes that dropped them—Nemes ratchets up the tension with grave stakes, the likes of which give any historical hair-raiser its backbone. Other Resistance members await them in the tall of the farmland grasses, darting their heads every which way wearily in search of Nazis anticipating their operation.
Most of the film takes place in the shadows of Lyon’s SS prison, where occasional daylight pierces through the rotting window bars of the cells as Obersturmführer Klaus Barbie (a horrifically good Lars Eidinger) plays mind game after mind game with Moulin to determine whether or not he’s a French Resistance member or merely the interior designer he claims to be. Moulin continually outsmarts Barbie with a well-rehearsed backstory and brilliant spur-of-the-moment wit. Every time it appears he’s been cornered, he calmly comes up with a genius response that makes him seem a simple civilian and puts the Nazi officer off his stench. We can tell he’s practiced meticulously for this situation.
Barbie eventually outfoxes the renegade Moulin in a dastardly, devastating sequence I’ll leave for discovery. But he still doesn’t know who Moulin is. As such, the subject of this film’s tension takes on new meaning, and the word game between the opposing parties becomes a game of torture and tell. Barbie wants to know who Max is, when and where the Allied forces will land on D-Day, and every detail on Resistance members he’s yet to sniff out. Will Moulin cave to the savage beatings, electric shocks, and psychological warfare of Barbie and his repulsive gang of SS brutes? Or will he remain silent, providing The Secret Army with a hope for repelling the invading Third Reich? (Don’t read the IMDb synopsis if you don’t want to know.)
Lellouche is quite something in the much better of his two films at the festival this year, the first of which held the once-prestigious opening-night slot that’s been dismissible in the five years since Annette. Lurking under street lamps, contemplating in prison cells, and donning different identities to remain hidden, he brandishes the burden of suspicion and heaves the weight of the war on his back with gravitas. Nemes’ directorial tendencies are on point, but they aren’t as enigmatic or unforgettable as they’ve been in the past.
Moulin is thus a worthwhile, well-made, engaging watch, and it’s bound to grab anyone interested in this particular history, especially given how immersively it’s recreated by production designer Stéphane Rozenbaum. But it’s far from a must-see and unlikely to wield any awards up against the titans of this year’s competition.
Moulin premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.