Premiered in the main competition at Cannes, the directorial debut of the talented screenwriter Harari – who also wrote Anatomy of a Fall (2023) – can be described as kindred in spirit to the style of Antonioni, but he dissects society with a solitaire of identities, weaving in a “virus” acquired through pleasure. The world is taken over by an identity crisis fuelled by desire, and Kafka cracks a smile.

The most ordinary of photographers leads the most ordinary, monotonous life in Paris. David is obsessed with the past and with a photo series of a woman encountered by chance. At a carnival where psychedelia meets the hedonic and confetti rains from the head of an orange politician, the melancholic man meets the woman he has been observing in a Peeping Tom manner. Both surrender to a wordless moment of passion in the night, but morning reveals something horrifying. David is no longer himself, he is someone else: his body is not his own. He learns the body’s new name: Eva.

A metaphysical, unsettling horror about the loss of self – with this premise, Harari petrifies and even entertains in an intellectually perverse manner. Even with the plot device referring to “la petite mort”, the climax of physical intimacy in French, the director offers the freedom to read the characters (and personas) of Niels Schneider and Léa Seydoux as a food-for-thought comedy with existential goosebumps, with Radu Jude, the enfant terrible of Romanian cinema, making an appearance as a builder. A masterpiece of ideas and street philosophy, in which playing around with bodily dysmorphia only reinforces the notion that memory is what makes us who we are.