A (lonely) man meets a (beautiful) woman who would go on to change his life––a tale as old as time. Transformations, physical or psychological, are part and parcel of storytelling, even if the heteronormative reality of such an encounter can be considered anecdotal. While one might scoff at meet-cutes and conventional romcom plot points, The Unknown uses exactly that trope to explore the complex terrain of post-gender identity. Writer-director Arthur Harari, who co-penned Anatomy of a Fall‘s Oscar-winning script with Justine Triet, has already shown a penchant for subversive takes on genre.
Considering his period war drama Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle and the revenge thriller Dark Diamond, his third film boasting a rather enigmatic set-up comes as no surprise. In The Unknown, an isolated, middle-aged photographer named David (Niels Schneider) encounters fate in the face of a mysterious woman (Léa Seydoux). A subject of a candid shot he’s taken a few weeks earlier, she appears at a party and lures him to a basement for a wordless, anonymous sexual act. In the next scene, the person who wakes up in the woman’s body turns out to be David.
Based on the 2024 graphic novel The David Zimmerman Case by the director and his brother Lucas Harari, The Unknown has the tough mission of turning a beguiling body-swap premise into an engaging, well-paced work in its own right, and casting is crucial to achieve such. With a Cannes mainstay like Léa Seydoux leading alongside an actor as versatile as Schneider, The Unknown earns its keep, for all the eerie undercurrents fueling its uneven narrative. In a film where performances are doubled by default—every character inhabits the body of another—Seydoux gets to shine in a role she plays so fluently that it tops even the paradoxical peak she reached in Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast. Without the ornaments of femininity that defined her character there, David/Eve is left fragile and bewildered. Horror fills the scene where David first discovers her naked female body, but the kind mixed with exhilaration as her hands tremble holding up a mirror to breasts, rolled stomach, and vagina—the epitome of uncanny (in the Freudian sense) balanced by Seydoux’s pared-down performance, which miraculously suspends the scene between fetishization and repulsion.
While not directly referenced in the film, Greek mythology afflicts a metamorphosis on a character for two reasons: either as punishment or to bestow salvation, just as the prophet Tiresias was transformed into a woman for striking a pair of snakes. In The Unknown, a gender transition’s punitive element feels pointed when the little we know of David suggests a recluse and borderline stalker. If, however, the punishment for his behavior is to live in a body that doesn’t belong to him, one very important question emerges: is this film aligning with body dysmorphia, or does it misunderstand transness, even if neither of those terms are actually present in the dialogue?
Harari tiptoes around any question of transness, refusing to allow a single mention of it (not even from the one Gen Z character, played by Lilith Grasmug) to the very end, in a gesture that could easily be construed as anti-trans. The script prefers to ask more abstract questions about the aftermath of body-swap—or, “metempsychosis,” as the blatant Google-search desktop shot reads—in terms of privacy, boundaries, ethics, even the value of living your life in another’s body. Yet those philosophical provocations ring empty when bodies, gender, and genitals are at the center of that discussion.
The Unknown instead cloaks such prescient issues in conjectures, naming the non-consensual body-swap simply “the disease”—or for that matter, the film’s vague title—and the “transmission” is a sex scene of almost impressive mechanical qualities where an achieved orgasm facilitates the swap. But if “the disease” spreads through sexual intercourse and the sex it targets is so dispassionate, instrumental, and completely unsexy, what exactly is at stake here? A critique of casual sex or puritanism? It seems The Unknown could better sustain this state of limbo—between male and female, embrace and disavow—as a graphic novel than a film. Many human bodies are made binary, but identities aren’t, and perhaps it’s high time cinema imagined body-swapping as pleasurable, not sanction.
The Unknown premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and will be released by NEON.