Cannes Review: Kantemir Balagov’s Butterfly Jam Can’t Find a Rhythm

Without putting too fine a point on it, the 2026 Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes has kicked off with a bit of a dog. The latest from exiled Russian filmmaker Kantemir Balagov, Butterfly Jam takes place in and around the Circassian community in New Jersey—a diasporic milieu that will call to mind movies like Anora, Little Odessa, and Levan Koguashvili’s underappreciated Brighton Fourth, only with little of the texture or granular details that made those pictures feel so lived-in. 

For anyone who followed the festival scene in the second half of the 2010s, this might come as a bit of a surprise. Writing for Filmmaker Magazine in 2020, the critic Carlos Aguilar—not one for hyperbole—probably spoke for most critics at the time when he described Balagov as “a prodigy of international cinema” on the cusp of “an auspicious career.” For that interview, Aguilar had met the then-28-year-old director in sunny L.A. where Balagov was campaigning for an Oscar nomination for his second feature, Beanpole—a remarkable film that had been one of Cannes’ great success stories the previous year. 

Time does fly. Butterfly Jam, his first project since, focuses on the relationship between a young father who works as a chef in his sister’s cafe serving delen (a tortilla-like delicacy) to the local community, and his son who’s training to become a wrestler. One day, a local businessman drops by and is won over by the dish, and a more lucrative job appears to be in the cards. This stroke of good fortune comes in the same week that his sister announces she’s pregnant and his son wins a match and is interviewed on local TV. For a brief moment, their unconventional but tender family unit appears to be on the up, but as the rules of gravity and storytelling dictate, such leaps of upward mobility are seldom to be trusted. 

The father’s name is Azik and he’s played by Barry Keoghan, a skilled performer who inhabited another conspicuously young dad to a teenage kid in Andrea Arnold’s Bird two years ago. (A 2024 Cannes premiere that, like its fellow Anora, casts a long shadow here—winged wonder and flights of magical realism included.) The Irish star is joined by newcomer Talha Akdogan as Pyteh, who probably does the steadiest work out of anyone here besides Riley Keough—an actress who I’ve yet to see give a bad performance, in spite of some adventurous but uneven choices in recent years. Butterfly Jam is usually at its best whenever Keough is in the room, and the rare moments in which her and Keoghan’s performances click perhaps offer a glimmer of what might have been.

That central trio is joined by Harry Melling, a former Harry Potter star who has admirably managed to shed the skin of those movies—earning a reputation as one of the more interesting and versatile British actors of his generation in the process. We got a hint of this with his limbless marionette act in the Coens’ Ballad of Buster Scrubs and saw him rise to the occasion with his breakout performance in Pillion last year, but whether through Butterfly’s script or Balagov’s direction, his Marat—an impulsive, volatile Ziggy to Keoghan’s Nick Sobotka—stands conspicuously underdeveloped. As Keough’s heavily pregnant Zalya works to keep the cafe going, the movie’s male characters each take turns experiencing their own crises of masculinity. Mileage may vary, but when it comes time for these uneven storylines to reach their climactic moment, the lack of time spent with Marat’s insecurities leaves the movie’s key scene feeling rushed at best, at worst gratuitous.

Revisiting those early Balagov years in the week leading up to Cannes, it was easy to feel seduced by that fervor of that moment all over again. Here was an improbably talented and good-looking filmmaker who’d risen up seemingly out of nowhere, graduated from Aleksandr Sokurov’s filmmaking school, and won back-to-back prizes in Cannes with his first two films before the age of 30. That early flush led to a surprise offer from HBO to direct the first episode of The Last of Us, which Balagov eventually left due to creative differences (Craig Mazin said the resulting pilot contained 40% of his footage) just as Russia’s tanks rolled into Ukraine, forcing him into exile. Creative flows have been disrupted by far less consequential things; here’s hoping it’s only temporary. 

Butterfly Jam premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.