Seen through a child’s eyes, the French Riviera suggests heaven on Earth. For the three at the heart of Bruno Dumont’s Red Rocks—Geo (Kaylon Lancel), Manon (Louise Podolski), and Rouben (Mohamed Coly)—their small town is all they know, with new adventures every day as they ride dirt bikes along the seafront or find new heights to scale and from which to jump into the water. We never see their parents; these five-year-olds roam the expanses of this town without anything in the way of adult supervision. The first time we meet an unnamed adult, he’s lamenting on the phone about how most bars and clubs here have shut down, with very little in the way of culture or nightlife beyond the beach itself. Every time Dumont shows a train passing by overhead, it feels like we could be witnessing more adults fleeing a town that has long stopped being a playground for them. Suddenly, these kids’ isolation makes a lot more sense.
Swapping his usual stomping ground of Northern France for sunnier terrain down south, Red Rocks is Dumont at his most uncharacteristically gentle, albeit with the lingering threat that a bloody accident could happen each time these kids try jumping in the sea. With the director’s recent pivot to lowbrow genre parodies, there was still part of me expecting the film to become a spiritual successor to the British public safety information shorts of the 1970s, which happily depicted multiple children dying in gruesome ways—cautionary tales to young audiences about playing in building sites or on train tracks. Instead, it suggests an evolution for the director, retreating from high-concept territory to the Bressonian comfort zone of his early work, albeit with a sunnier disposition.
For his penchant to work with non-professional actors—particularly favoring those with physical disabilities or who seem especially uncomfortable in front of a camera—Dumont has always been open to the criticism that he is exploiting performers. While anything involving child actors as young as those here will never be immune to such accusations, the director takes better advantage of that inherent tension than in prior work. Lancel, his young lead, frequently struggles to hide his agitation beneath facial tics, which gives his character a richer perspective than whatever slim characterization was on the page. The dialogue appears to be heavy on improvisation and heavier still in awkward silences, with the kids unable to sustain a conversation that lasts for more than a couple of sentences. Knowing the limitations of non-professional actors this young, Dumont instead harnesses the actor’s clear discomfort as a way of expressing emotions he doesn’t yet have the language to communicate. The approach makes for an authentic depiction of kids’ psychology at this age, even with the paradox of a child actor plainly aware that a camera is always hovering right in front of him.
As Red Rocks progresses, the core group meets a gang of three other rock-jumping children: Eve (Kelsie Verdeilles), B (Alessandro Piqeura), and Do (Meryl Piles). The first two are in a relationship that quickly becomes a love triangle after Eve meets Geo, with rumors constantly circling the friend group that B is ready to attack his new rival. This stretch of the film—which transforms the naturalistic drama into an extended comedy skit where children perform melodramatic soap opera scenes—feels like Dumont lapsing into the lazier impulses of his more recent work, although mercifully remains a world away from the New French Extremity-adjacent approach of his earliest efforts. The relationships between these children are adorably innocent (hugs represent the peak of romance) but the dialogue is still heavy on cliché-laden rifts between Geo and the boy who claims he’s “stolen” his girl—it undercuts a more observant depiction of young childhood.
When Geo and Eve separate from their friend groups to explore the world on their own, Dumont reassumes a more naturally youthful energy. Assisted with the child’s eye perspective granted by cinematographer Carlos Alfonso Corral (who shot Roberto Minervini’s The Damned) it becomes a masterclass in controlled chaos, and letting these kids be kids; in one sustained long take in Eve’s parents’ driveway, they wear themselves out while running back and forth and trying to get the family dog to leave with them. On a later excursion out of town, we can see the chemistry between the two actors has developed enough that they feel more comfortable together, and it results in less-predictable behavior—rather than exploiting his leads, it seems Dumont is letting their ramshackle energy drive the story, running hand-in-hand in and out of one scene into the next. It contrasts with Corral’s extreme close-ups whenever Geo is seated, appearing claustrophobic and uncomfortable within the frame. He’s too small to realize he wanted to escape the confines of this town, but the grammar of the movie around him appears to be developed with an intuitive knowledge that this young actor is never happier than while exploring the wider world and afforded space to roam freely.
If it wasn’t for the trope-laden love-triangle plot—a misguided attempt to force a more constructed narrative into a slice-of-life drama that didn’t require one—Red Rocks would be Dumont’s most successful collaboration with non-professional actors, as well as one of the most authentic depictions of childhood we’ve seen recently. It doesn’t quite achieve that greatness, yet still seems another major step forward for a director approaching his fourth decade behind the camera.
Red Rocks premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.