FRENCH CINEMA RESISTS

FRENCH CINEMA RESISTS

An Alternative to the Blockbuster

By Serge Leterrier

"Faced with content uniformization, faced with algorithms that format narratives, these filmmakers choose rigor, singularity, risk."

December 3, 2025 marks a singular date for French cinema. Three works release simultaneously, three narratives refusing the ease of mainstream spectacle to plunge into the abysses of the human psyche. This synchronicity reveals more than calendar coincidence: it testifies to a creative vitality proving French cinema still possesses that capacity to explore intimacy with singular intensity.

Camille-Cottin et Manoâ-Varvat in "Children Are Fine" I Copyright StudioCanal

I watch the trailers unfold for Julia Kowalski's Her Will Be Done, Nathan Ambrosioni's The Children Are Fine, and Cédric Anger's series The Hunt, and immediately perceive what connects them: a narrative urgency making psychological tension the true dramatic engine. Where Hollywood multiplies explosions to mask screenwriting vacuity, these French creators choose emotional confinement, anxiety's slow rise, that particular way of filming humanity at the precipice.

Julia Kowalski plants her 16mm camera on a French farm ruled by patriarchal architecture. Her heroine Nawojka conceals a power awakening with desire. The fantastic becomes political metaphor, this story of a rural witch refusing erasure. The Franco-Polish director draws from her roots to create a hybrid object where Catholic mysticism meets transgressive eroticism. Her mise-en-scène assumes artificiality, those slow zooms recalling 1970s genre cinema. The filmmaker proves one can unite formal rigor with fantastic dimension.

Nathan Ambrosioni constructs his second feature around voluntary disappearance. Suzanne arrives at her sister Jeanne's with her two children, then evaporates by morning. This absence becomes the film's beating heart. Camille Cottin embodies Jeanne with that precision making one forget the performance. Opposite her, Juliette Armanet brings necessary fragility. Ambrosioni explores familial fractures with delicacy refusing emphasis. The film questions this contemporary vertigo: how far can individual choice go when it shatters others' lives?

Benoit Magimel et Mélanie Laurent ln "The Hunt" I Copyright-Apple-TV-

Cédric Anger signs for Apple TV+ a series transforming the hunting party into paranoid nightmare. Benoît Magimel and Mélanie Laurent embody an ordinary couple toppling into horror. Franck and his friends hunt Sundays, ancestral masculine ritual. Until the day another group targets them. Retaliation, flight, then that terrible sensation of being hunted. Anger films peripheral France with that taut realism characterizing his cinema. The thriller becomes social portrait, exploration of masculinity devouring itself.

These three works share one obsession: filming the trapped individual. Whether that trap be family, tradition, or masculine violence ultimately matters little. What fascinates here lies in how these filmmakers refuse easy answers. Julia Kowalski lets ambiguity hover over her witch: demonic possession or metaphor for repressed female desire? Ambrosioni refuses to explain Suzanne's disappearance, preferring to film its consequences on those remaining. Anger builds his tension on the mystery of aggressors, this menace whose deep motivations remain unknown.

This screenwriting approach radically breaks with dominant cinema. French audiences rediscover the pleasure of works respecting their intelligence, accepting ambiguity rather than explaining everything. The success at the Angoulême Francophone Film Festival, where The Children Are Fine swept the Valois de diamant, proves this expectation exists. Spectators want films that overwhelm them, question them, disturb them. They want cinema taking risks.

These works' intimist dimension confers particular power. Where blockbusters bet on spectacle's scope, these narratives concentrate all energy on a few characters, a few limit situations. Her Will Be Done unfolds essentially on a farm and its surroundings. The Children Are Fine explores Jeanne's house transformed into crisis space. The Hunt films men lost in mountains, their playground become mortal trap. This economy of means demands surgical precision in writing, mise-en-scène, actor direction.

Maria Wróbel in "Her Will Be Done" I Copyright New Story

This grouped release also reveals intelligent production strategy. StudioCanal for The Children Are Fine, Grande Ourse Films and Venin Films for Her Will Be Done, Gaumont for The Hunt: these companies bet on demanding projects carried by affirmed auteurs. They prove an auteur cinema economy remains possible, viable, necessary. Pre-purchase by Canal+, Ciné+ and France Télévisions testifies to an ecosystem still supporting creative risk-taking.

I leave these three works haunted by their images, their silences, their contained violences. They prove French cinema still possesses this capacity to invent forms, to explore humanity in all its complexity. Faced with content uniformization, faced with algorithms formatting narratives, these filmmakers choose rigor, singularity, risk. Their creative vitality offers precious alternative to spectators weary of formula cinema. December 3, 2025 perhaps marks the beginning of a new wave, that of a French cinema refusing compromise to better touch the heart.