Directed by: Arthur Harari
Distributed by: Neon
Written by Eric Zhu
85/100
A supernatural act of transference occurs at the opening of Arthur Harari’s “The Unknown.” The inciting incident is executed in wordless, lurid detail when Daniel runs into a mysterious woman (Lea Seydoux) at a masquerade party (complete with exploding paper-mache replicas of world leaders). They have sex, and when Daniel awakens, he finds himself in the woman’s body. As opposed to a traditional body-swap thriller, Harari practically dispenses with the idea that Daniel will ever be able to reconcile body and soul. When he finds his old body, he finds that the entity has swapped again and it’s inhabited by a young Romanian girl, Malia. As the two characters unite to process their literal disembodiment, their increasingly cryptic, desperate attempts to make sense of their situations lead the film into hellish depths of panic and despair.
Among “The Unknown’s” greatest virtues is the way its screenplay seems to reconfigure every few scenes in ways that make perfect sense, leaving unknowns that haunt the rest of the film, lending the film any number of possible interpretations. First and foremost is the identity of the perpetrator – Who or what is this entity? Were Daniel and Malia targeted, and if so, why? The questions cascade from there in a manner that recalls the slippery, sinuous pleasures of Antonioni, De Palma, and Bonello.
Even more than being interested in the experience of living in another body, “The Unknown” tackles the idea of double-consciousness, the strange experience of viewing yourself from afar, seeing someone else receive your mother’s embrace, watching a loved one’s wedding, projecting your soul onto your social media or the location of your phone. Harari tackles this issue in ways that are timeless, but unmistakably contemporary. A truly terrifying excursion on Reddit sees Daniel and Malia looking for others touched by the entity, leading them to a pair of siblings, one a voyeur, one a sort of domestic prisoner, who are just… off. We never understand whether one of them is troubled as a result of institutionalization or the body-swap, nor do we ever figure out the strange, obsessive motivations of the other, locked in a high-rise with a telescope, but both are surrounded by an atmosphere of menace and mourning. Daniel flees the situation at the first hint of danger (one unmistakably tied to gendered violence they’re now distinctly aware of), and the way Harari ratchets the tension throughout this extended counter is terrifying.
As for possible interpretations, “The Unknown” reminded me of a passage from Michael Sicinski’s recent writing on this year’s Wavelengths lineup, which reflects on the slate’s range of approaches towards archival filmmaking. On the digital archive, Sicinski notes:
“(…) the offloading of consciousness onto the digital realm sets the stage for whole-cloth revisionism. Digital knowledge does leave a trace, a footprint deep in the code, but it is legible only to a select few. But it isn’t a palimpsest. A fully digital archive lacks reminders, the partial erasures and strikethroughs and overwriting, that one finds in physical culture, as well as in our memories. Instead, it allows for a wholesale find/replace function – instantaneous, possibly permanent change.”
This is certainly a way to read “The Unknown’s” treatment of identity externalized, how we could theoretically tie ourselves to any online persona or social media profile, complete with a set of texts and images that act as proxies for memories, real and imagined. Daniel and Malia are people who have effectively been “revised” by a digital agent, their identities instantaneously replaced. This becomes especially striking given Daniel and Malia’s heritage. Along with Jude’s “Diary of a Chambermaid” (Jude actually plays Malia’s distraught father in “The Unknown”), and “Fjord,” “The Unknown” is another film about the intra-European power dynamics as Daniel and Malia become disembodied from their respective Jewish and Romanian heritage (another salient reference point: Basma Alsharif’s anti-assimilationist short, “Morgenkreis”).
Drawing a line from interpersonal voyeurism to the hyper-surveilled present, the way Harari explores murky historic precedents to Daniel and Malia’s conundrum are some of “The Unknown’s” most terrifying ellipses. On the cinematic side, Harari evokes both the experience of acting and character identification. After the initial swap, Daniel watches an action film that supposedly stars his body, but learns precious little about Eva, the name attached to it. Daniel’s photography practice takes a more prominent role in the narrative. The film opens with him pursuing a project left behind by his father, who died by suicide after devoting his life to photographing locations from 1920s French postcards. The project raises a set of interesting questions, namely reiterating the question of how this deeply personal project also becomes assimilated into collective memory. It also seems very intentional that Daniel’s practice is entirely analog, an archive untouched by the mutations of the digital. On a narrative level though, what happened to Daniel’s father? Do the characters’ twinned fates reflect the cyclical nature of history? And of course, what to make of the final scene with Daniel’s mother? In a moment of synchronicity one often finds at a film festival, the ending of “The Unknown” seems to mirror the ending of another NYFF 2026 film, Jacqueline Lentzou’s “A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra,” the two films concluding on a moment of shared, cosmic grief between mother and child.
“The Unknown” Trailer
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