Arthur Harari’s film is adapted from a graphic novel he wrote with his brother Lucas called The Case of David Zimmerman. It is a doomy, murky and intriguing supernatural noir mystery, hardly visible within the dark toxic cloud of its own strangeness, populated by people bearing stricken expressions of misery and fear. There are some genuinely uncanny and disquieting moments. Maybe it is a parable for the crisis of gender identity – or just identity, and everyone’s occasional experience of the profound, unreconcilable unknowability of our own bodies. There is also something of the mood of Blow-Up, or Basil Dearden’s Brit pulp chiller The Man Who Haunted Himself, or indeed David Robert Mitchell’s modern classic It Follows. But this one, sadly, is flawed by that perennial problem of how to end a story with a great premise.
Niels Schneider plays David Zimmerman, a photographer in his late 30s documenting the way in which his home town has changed over the past century – a project inherited from his photographer dad. (He has an old photo of them both seated on the pavement, apparently mimicking Chaplin and the Kid.) David is overworked, dishevelled and depressed, but is just about persuaded to go along to a raucous New Year’s Eve party where he is stunned to glimpse a woman staring at him, played by Léa Seydoux, whom he realises he photographed a few months’ previously.
She is apparently called Eve, a would-be actor who had a temp catering job at an anniversary party where David was taking pictures. She angrily quit after being yelled at for dropping a tray of glasses and, entranced by her moody defiance, David neglected his official duties to snap her as she stalked off. They have sex in an impossibly squalid basement, and David wakes up the next day to find he is now in Eve’s body.
He is terrified and fascinated by female anatomy (though a more comical film might have scenes with David/Eve getting to grips with novel problems like doing up a bra). Almost paralysed with horror at the waking nightmare of this situation, he finds a way of getting into Eve’s apartment (which, importantly, has a picture of Bob Dylan on the wall), and then he seeks out his own walking, talking male body, which he assumes Eve’s consciousness now inhabits. But it is not as simple as that. Before their meeting, Eve had been animated by an evil invader, with her authentic consciousness long since discarded, and the invader, having taken over David’s body during the sex act, went on to have sex with another woman, Malia (Lilith Grasmug), whose consciousness is now imprisoned in David’s body. A succubus is going around instigating a chain-letter sequence of metempsychotic hookups, which results in a male consciousness within a pregnant female body.
It really is very bizarre. Not-Eve and not-David are faced with a deeply peculiar challenge: could they somehow partly rectify this situation by having sex, which might restore David to his real body and at least give the third woman an actual female form? Finally, having stumbled around in the wilderness of physio-psychological mirrors, our troubled hero and heroine give us to understand that they (and we) have pretty much run out of narrative road. Seydoux, with dark circles under her eyes, is now almost catatonic, having gazed into that abyss which, in Nietzsche’s words, has been gazing back for almost two hours. It is a distinctly disquieting and baffling experience.
• The Unknown screened at the Cannes film festival.
