Overview
- The film, which premiered Thursday in Cannes and opened the same day in French theaters, began drawing swift reactions from critics.
- The story follows Sylvie, a reclusive novelist who watches three neighbors across the way and writes a fiction that starts to collide with their real lives after a young man named Adam enters the picture.
- Isabelle Huppert leads a high‑profile ensemble with Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel, Pierre Niney and Adam Bessa, and Catherine Deneuve earns notice for a brief, standout scene.
- Farhadi built the French‑language project as a loose riff on Krzysztof Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Love from the Dekalog cycle, using a mirror‑like structure to play with reality and imagination.
- Early reviews in France are split, with Télérama and Le Parisien praising the script, direction and performances, and Le Figaro dismissing the film as empty despite its marquee cast, as coverage also notes Farhadi’s inability to shoot in Iran.