Léa Seydoux is not quite herself in the U.S. trailer for Arthur Harari’s controversial premiere at Cannes, The Unknown.

      This year, few titles have provoked such a strange reaction as Arthur Harari’s The Unknown. Following an unimpressive premiere at Cannes, another of our writers declared it the film of the year. For some of us, the mere fact that Léa Seydoux grapples with profound existential dilemmas is enough of a draw, but it's a bonus to know one might gain more than just a surface appreciation. With a domestic release from Neon on the horizon, the U.S. trailer has arrived.

      Savina Petkova was not entirely sold on Harari’s vision, commenting in our Cannes review, “The Unknown instead masks such timely topics in hypotheses, referring to the non-consensual body swap simply as ‘the disease’—or the film’s ambiguous title—and the ‘transmission’ occurs during a sex scene that has an almost mechanical quality, with an achieved orgasm enabling the swap. But if ‘the disease’ spreads through sexual intercourse and the sex portrayed is so unemotional, utilitarian, and completely uninspiring, what is really at stake here? Is this a critique of casual sex or puritanism? It seems that The Unknown might be more effectively suited as a graphic novel rather than a film, as it exists in a state of tension—oscillating between male and female, embrace and rejection. Many bodies are categorized as binary, but identities are not, and perhaps it is indeed time for cinema to envision body-swapping as something pleasurable, not punitive.”

      Here’s the synopsis: “David is a photographer in Paris. A bit of a loner, he becomes intrigued by a young woman he meets during an assignment. That night, at a drug-laden party, David catches her eye from across the room and decides to follow her. By morning, David wakes up in the young woman’s body. From writer-director Arthur Harari, the Academy Award-winning co-writer of Anatomy of a Fall, comes a captivating and thought-provoking tale of identity displacement — the story of a man who stops being himself, only to turn into someone else… or perhaps no one at all.”

      Watch the trailer below: