Guillaume Canet's psychological thriller Karma premiered out of competition at Cannes back in May, and it opens in French theaters on October 21. The reviews out of the festival were split, but they converged on one point worth holding onto: Marion Cotillard delivers one of the most intense performances of her career.
She plays Jeanne, a woman who has built a careful new life with her partner in a fishing village on the Costa Brava, carrying the weight of a past she never talks about. One afternoon her six-year-old godson disappears while in her care, and suspicion falls on her fast. Before the investigation can close in, she crosses the border into rural France and returns to the one place she swore she would never see again: the religious commune she was raised in, run by a man named Marc, played by Denis Ménochet.
Canet is returning to the mode that gave him his biggest success two decades ago with Tell No One, and he wrote the role of Jeanne specifically for Cotillard. Behind the camera is Benoît Debie, the cinematographer known for his work with Gaspar Noé, who bleeds the film's warm opening sepia into colder, more oppressive grays as Jeanne moves deeper into her old world. At two and a half hours, the film takes its time.
Why it matters
The honest word from Cannes is that Karma is uneven. Several critics found it overlong and felt it leaned on familiar beats in its portrait of a cult rather than digging into the real psychology of one. It is not the flawless return some hoped for. So why point you toward it anyway.
Because a Cotillard performance at full commitment is its own reason to watch, and by nearly every account this is one of her fiercest. There is a particular kind of film worth seeing for a single towering piece of acting that holds a flawed structure together, and this looks like one of them. Debie's images and Ménochet's textured villain give her something real to work against.
Karma is the kind of release worth marking now and deciding on for yourself once it arrives. Sometimes the argument a film starts is more interesting than a clean success would have been.
Karma opens in French theaters on October 21 through Pathé.
About this film
