The Léa Seydoux Body-Swap Movie ‘The Unknown’ Has Already Sparked Intense Debate at Cannes

“Obviously, like everyone in this profession, I enjoy recognition,” he said. “I’m not indifferent. But my path means it comes indirectly. I once told my psychoanalyst, ‘I’d really like to become known, but without doing any of the things you’re supposed to do to get there.’ Admitting as much felt odd, but that actually suits me very well.” 

In 2021, Harari broke through with “Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle,” a nearly three-hour epic shot in Japanese, styled after John Ford, about a Japanese holdout who continues his private war for decades after WWII ends. The film opened Un Certain Regard and later won the César for Best Original Screenplay. Two years later, Harari returned to Cannes as co-lead of the Directors’ Fortnight opener “The Goldman Case” and as co-writer of Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall.” You know what happened next.

Riding that professional momentum, Harari now uses his new film as a kind of reintroduction. Adapted from a graphic novel he wrote with his brother Lucas, “The Unknown” opens on David, a Jewish Frenchman raised in the Paris suburbs with a strong interest in visual art. But David — an almost unrecognizable Niels Schneider — does not stay in his own body for long. During a particularly unglamorous intimate encounter, minds and consciousnesses suddenly switch, and he wakes up the next morning as a woman, played by Léa Seydoux. 

“All of my films focus on identity,” said Harari. “Here, I make that idea very direct: The body switch works like a mirror. I don’t treat the film as an intellectual or conceptual exercise. I approach it more playfully: How does a film about someone closer to myself work with a woman at the center? What does that create? How do I still make something personal while exploring that transformation?” 

And “The Unknown” is personal, returning to the northern Paris suburb where Harari grew up in a progressive, art-minded family much like the one onscreen. Still, don’t expect too many direct confessions. 

“At first, it was my brother’s graphic novel,” he said with a grin. “It’s not like I woke up one morning and thought, ‘I’m going to tell this story.’ It began as his obsession, something very intimate to him, and then I took over that obsession and made it my own. When you hear Glenn Gould play Bach, you hear Glenn Gould immediately, even though he didn’t compose a single note. That’s just how cinema works: through interpretation, you end up revealing yourself.” 

Without giving too much away, “The Unknown” gradually pushes its premise into existential horror, moving beyond the initial shock of waking up in someone else’s body to the deeper fear of becoming a stranger to your own life — especially once the film introduces other people suffering from the same affliction. In that sense, it could almost be called “The Uncanny,” returning again and again to the feeling of looking at the familiar from the outside, suddenly and irreversibly cut off from what once felt like home. 

“I didn’t think the film would produce that much anxiety,” he laughed. “But many viewers have told me otherwise.” 

Of course, the film quickly became a conduit for Harari’s own concerns, made all the more resonant once the narrative aperture widens to reveal that its central soul-swap may be only one of many. 

“There’s a great tradition in horror and science fiction built around the idea of dissemination — of a nightmare continuing endlessly, sprawling far beyond the film itself,” he said, citing all three versions of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” alongside Cronenberg’s early work. 

“I wanted to remain within that tradition without ever stating things explicitly,” he continued. “We don’t know whether there are multiple cases, multiple lines, one person, or several. But there’s something circulating and spreading through society — perhaps a fear that nothing is true anymore, or a feeling of total disconnection — and I tried to give that a shape.” 

At April’s Cannes selection press conference, Thierry Frémaux predicted the film would prove one of the festival’s most polarizing titles, comparing it to “L’Avventura” and revealing that, more than any other selection, it had already sparked intense debate within the Cannes committee. 

It’s easy to see why. Harari set out to write something deliberately open-ended — an allusive, elusive work channeling anxieties around digital atomization through a decidedly analog visual style. 

The fact that this rupture between body and mind occurs through sexual contact lends the film one obvious set of resonances and possible readings; the premise of a Jewish man awakening inside the body of a German woman suggests another entirely. 

“The film is a mirror,” he said. “Kafka is a major influence — and it’s impossible to imagine a writer more shaped by the Jewish question than him — but others see entirely different reflections. A friend of Vietnamese origin told me it reminded her of myths in which dead soldiers return to haunt society through living bodies. Others have connected it to Buddhism.  The film needed to work on a more subterranean register.”

Of course, given the precise and acute way the film accents gender dysphoria — of knowing with absolutely no ambiguity that you are in the wrong body — one particular reading is assured. 

“People will see this through the mirror of trans identity,” he said. “Obviously, I can’t pretend that dimension isn’t there — the film is about bodies and sex changing. I don’t have that experience myself, but what seems central is less sex than gender, and gender is fundamentally about how we’re constructed and how we perceive ourselves. What matters most to me is identity itself, of people questioning who they are.” 

He also wants viewers to look at his two highly photogenic leads in a radically different way, destabilizing any trace of movie-star allure. 

“I wanted to see how far we could go,” he said. “Not to make them ugly — I still think they’re beautiful — but to move beyond glamour. Their beauty isn’t framed in any conventional way, partly because cinema allows us to dissolve those boundaries, and partly because I had to keep people asking, ‘Who is this person?’ You spend almost two and a half hours with them, and in the end, you still can’t answer that in any simple way.” 

Harari might be even happier if audiences walked away from this deeply personal film saying the same thing about him. 

“Once everything is completely exposed and people say, ‘Ah, yes, he does that,’ it becomes very hard to preserve freedom,” he said. “Justine [Triet] is very strong at that — I really admire her for it. I don’t know if I could do the same. I don’t think I’ll ever have Justine’s level of notoriety. But being relatively unknown has one advantage: people know me without really knowing me, and so the central thing remains the work.”

A Neon release, “The Unknown” premieres at Cannes on Monday, May 18.