2026 Cannes Film Festival: Moulin, Garance, and Hope

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On the fifth day of the competition, the 2026 Cannes Film Festival presented László Nemes’s Moulin, Jeanne Herry’s Garance, and Na Hong-jin’s Hope.

Garance: The fifth day of the competition saw Hungarian director László Nemes enter the race with Moulin, a film centered on the French Resistance icon Jean Moulin. Following the success of All Your Faces (Je verrai toujours vos visages), French screenwriter and director Jeanne Herry received her very first invitation to the Cannes Film Festival with Garance, her fourth feature film. Marking his first time in the Official Competition, South Korean director Na Hong-jin returned to the Croisette with Hope, following The Chaser (Out of Competition, 2008), The Yellow Sea in Un Certain Regard in 2011, and The Wailing (Goksung, Out of Competition, 2016).

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László Nemes’ Moulin

On the Croisette, few films are capable of commanding such a dense silence after their screening. With Moulin, László Nemes delivers a suffocating and deeply intimate work on the final days of Jean Moulin. Following the shockwave of Son of Saul, the filmmaker returns to themes of confinement, political violence, and traumatic memory, this time shifting his camera into the oppressive corridors of the Lyon Gestapo in 1943. Arrested while attempting to unify the forces of the Resistance, Jean Moulin (Gilles Lellouche) is pitted against Klaus Barbie (Lars Eidinger) in a chillingly intense psychological duel. Faithful to his immersive directorial style, Nemes rejects any spectacular reenactment of World War II; he shoots in close proximity to bodies, breathing, and exhausted gazes. The story narrows almost entirely down to Moulin’s sensory experience, trapping the viewer in a state of permanent tension where every slamming door feels like the harbinger of an imminent execution. More than a historical biopic, Moulin becomes a dizzying face-off between humanism and barbarism.

Moulin ©DR

An Explorer of Memory and Human Consciousness

What strikes the viewer about László Nemes’s approach is his desire to strip the heroic figure of all monumentality to find the man behind the national myth. The director explains that he discovered in Jean Moulin not just a resistance fighter, but above all a man of culture, deeply attached to art and a certain ideal of European civilization. This approach infuses the film with a singular emotional power: Moulin never appears as a historical monument, but rather as a vulnerable, exhausted being, sometimes pierced by despair. In Cannes, many already see Moulin as one of the most political films of this 2026 edition, echoing contemporary tensions surrounding fragile democracies and European memory. By choosing to film “fragments” rather than a sweeping historical epic, Nemes composes a sensory work where the horror often unfolds off-screen, leaving the audience to mentally reconstruct the violence of reality. It is a radical approach that confirms the Hungarian filmmaker as one of the great contemporary explorers of memory and human consciousness.

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Jeanne Herry’s Garance

Amid the blinding light of the Croisette, Garance arrives as a raw, dizzying counterpoint to the glamourous narratives of French cinema. For her very first red carpet walk in the Cannes Film Festival’s Official Competition, Jeanne Herry delivers a feverish film about the downward spirals of a generation desperately trying to love without destroying itself. Driven by a magnetic Adèle Exarchopoulos, Garance navigates eight years of intimate chaos through dead-end parties, failed auditions, cramped rooms, and Parisian nights drowned in alcohol. Far from a conventional tale of addiction, Herry primarily captures a woman fighting to stay upright while everything around her falters: friendships, desire, ambitions, and even her own body. In this fragmented chronicle with the feel of a sentimental diary, Paris becomes a landscape of emotional wandering where partying serves as both a refuge and a poison. The camera follows the unpredictable movements of its heroine with an almost documentary-like tenderness, imbuing the film with a nervous intensity rarely seen in recent French cinema.

Garance DR

A Youth Burning Through Life for Fear of the Void

Since Number One Fan (Elle l’adore), Jeanne Herry has established herself as one of the most precise screenwriters of her generation, capable of addressing social and psychological fractures without ever sacrificing emotion. Following the phenomenal success of All Your Faces (Je verrai toujours vos visages), which swept the César Awards and was praised for its human accuracy, the filmmaker shifts registers here while maintaining her deeply empathetic gaze. In Cannes, Garance is already sparking passionate discussions, as much for its freedom of tone as for Adèle Exarchopoulos’s performance, who returns to an incandescent role that occasionally recalls the instinctive power that shook the Croisette in Blue Is the Warmest Color (La Vie d’Adèle). Alongside her, Sara Giraudeau brings a fragile sweetness to this tale of excess and reconstruction. Moving between nocturnal euphoria and silent despair, Garance paints a portrait of a youth burning through life for fear of the void, confirming Jeanne Herry’s entry into the highly exclusive circle of French auteurs capable of transforming the intimate into great popular cinema.

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Na Hong-jin’s Hope

There are certain Cannes screenings that electrify the Croisette even before the lights go down. Hope, the new film from South Korean filmmaker Na Hong-jin, belongs to that rare category. Returning to the Official Competition at the Cannes Film Festival with a work as ambitious as it is nightmarish, the director of The Chaser and The Wailing transforms a forgotten coastal village in the Korean Demilitarized Zone into the stage for an organic and metaphysical apocalypse. In Hope, a tiny, isolated police outpost by the sea, a mysterious extraterrestrial monster unleashes an uncontrollable chaos, while fires ravage the surrounding mountains, cutting off all communication with the rest of the country. In this apocalyptic landscape shrouded in fog, exhausted police officers, elderly residents, and makeshift young hunters plunge into a struggle where fear becomes even more contagious than the illness itself. True to his style, Na Hong-jin blends visceral horror, paranoid thriller, and spiritual reflection within a suffocating direction where every silence seems to herald an impending catastrophe.

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A Deeply Human Reading of Chaos

Yet behind the monstrous spectacle, Hope impresses above all with its deeply human reading of chaos. In Na Hong-jin’s cinema, horror is always born from humanity’s inability to comprehend what it faces. The filmmaker treats ignorance as a destructive force, capable of contaminating minds until it triggers a collective collapse. In Cannes, festival-goers emerged from the screening stunned by this twilight epic, where ecological anxiety, geopolitical tensions, and contemporary loneliness blur into the same sense of vertigo. The brutal violence of certain sequences contrasts sharply with the hypnotic beauty of the Korean landscapes, bathed in an almost surreal light. Having previously left a lasting impression out of competition with The Wailing (Goksung), the director seems to reach a new scale here, delivering a “monster-movie” that goes far beyond the confines of genre cinema. On the Croisette, Hope already stands out as one of the most radical and widely discussed experiences of this 2026 edition.