It can feel as if “The Unknown” arrives on screen from the late ‘70s or early ‘80s, already not appreciated in the time of its release, but accruing a cult following in the years since even though the print is relatively still wet from its Cannes premiere. At home amongst films such as “Possession” and “Videodrome,” not as exactly as inspirations, but sitting side-by-side on a shelf of VHS tapes when there had to be something in the air, Arthur Harari’s existential body-swapping thriller has that deep, guttural grey running through it that feels like the celluloid has picked up the contamination of the soul and while the film is bound to be compared to another classic of that era, Phillip Kaufman’s remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Harari’s adaptation of his own graphic novel with his brother Lucas is after something even more unsettling in limiting its focus to individual identity.
Built on exquisite performances when a sexually transmitted virus isn’t only an exchange of fluids but entire personalities, the film stars Léa Seydoux as Lea, a German actress who hooks up at a party with a photographer named David (Niels Schneider) and he finds the next morning that he is inhabiting her body with no obvious path back to his own. The act of intercourse is odd in the first place when the two seem drawn to one another without any emotional connection other than to lock eyes, and as David discovers while inside Lea, the two aren’t exactly strangers when he took her picture as she was catering an anniversary party while casually running off some film, though they have no relationship beyond that. A hunt begins to find David’s body, starting with a Google search about “switching bodies” and only slightly gets slightly more reasonable from there, eventually leads him to realize that while there is a physical form for him to recover, it may be difficult to ever return.
If the filmmaking seems of another era when it seems like the camera is genuinely motivated by a touch of madness, sitting still only for long, ruminative close-ups of Lea, David and eventually a young woman named Malia (Lilith Grasmug) who eventually finds her way into David’s skin, as they futilely try to get comfortable in their new bodies, “The Unknown” does seem to speak to a present moment of online personas being divorced from who people are in person and more and more are coming forward as trans and nonbinary, feeling uneasy with the body they were born into. The restless performances of Seydoux, Schneider and Grasmug really bring such a struggle home as they desperately seek out their initial physical form yet have to start wondering how much they were previously defined by it rather than the spirit they still have — or even drifted away from how they were remembered by others versus how they felt internally — and Harari, his brother Lucas and co-writer Vincent Poymiro have some fun with experiences the trio would only have liberated from their corporeal presence.
Perhaps keeping in character, the film itself is quite loose structurally and while having no overarching mythology ensures it’s never bogged down in exposition, it can feel slightly aimless at times over the course of nearly two-and-half-hours when there’s no larger-scale story to tell. Yet that’s hardly to say what’s going on doesn’t feel major as the characters grapple with who they are divorced from any outside construct – beyond their own soul searching, what are they if not a daughter, a friend or a lover who can no longer recognize them? – and as they find out, not being attached to a particular shape has some advantages as well, with the somewhat amorphous quality that the narrative has allowing for what curiosities it draws out to feel intensely personal. Far less overtly a horror film than its genre-friendly logline might imply, “The Unknown” somehow inspires a deeper sense of dread than any flesh wound that could be feared, ultimately putting the audiences in the shoes of those on screen when it seems like something unnerving and potentially insidious may have entered the system.
“The Unknown” will screen again at the Telluride Film Fest on September 6th at 9 am at the Sheridan Opera House.