– CANNES 2026: Personal and professional partners Lola Cambourieu and Yann Berlier mould a transfixing 24-hour story around the oft-inescapable vortex of domestic violence
Hugo Carton and Noëmie Édé-Decugis in Under a Bad Star
After working together on five short films, personal partners and professional collaborators Lola Cambourieu and Yann Berlier take the plunge into the feature world with a subject so thematically harrowing that their creative enmeshment with the topic feels almost inevitable. The French filmmakers’ own nine-year-old daughter, Anouk Berlier Cambourieu, plays Malone, the daughter of the central couple: Kiki (Noëmie Édé-Decugis) is caught in the abusive maelstrom of her partner Alex (Hugo Carton), who, in public, seems like any other man. Cambourieu and Berlier’s world-premiering Under a Bad Star feels like a bold but brilliant choice as the opening film of Cannes’ ACID sidebar, as a less gentle set of hands on the abrasive subject matter could have proven too ham-fisted.
It is through Malone that we first discover the couple’s story, and it is also how the two writer-directors close the film: a child playing unreservedly in nature, seemingly unbound by worry. When we first witness Kiki’s nervousness in full force as she returns home, reality finally closes in. Over the next 24 hours, Alex’s demands in private – often peculiar and contradictory – ebb and flow unpredictably in a performance of sickly sweet love infected by rage and a lust for control. Cambourieu and Berlier’s documentary-esque visual approach captures every gruelling second.
With cinematography credited to the two directors along with Charly Caillaux, the observational-style camera shakily trails around the couple like a shadow, following loosely improvised scenes within a structured narrative framework. Édé-Decugis’s circus and cabaret background practically oozes out of her character as Alex’s grip on her sanity manifests itself in her corporeal disintegration. Her hair grows increasingly greasy and her jowls are slowly pulled to the ground as if she were too fatigued to fight any more, caught between howling in despair and a dysregulation-driven love for her violent paramour.
Although there are moments of physical violence, the toxicity is felt on screen more through his web of dominion, rather than in a corporeal sense, whereby the audience is made to feel every verbal punch from Alex and every plea from Kiki. This two-hour-plus film (a difficult but deserved length) is filled with anxiety so thick that you could cut it with a knife – a blunt one, perhaps, which chafes with every slice. Just when you think there might be a respite, the onslaught begins again, forcing the audience to be trapped, too, in the psychologically unavoidable.
The frustration built into the work’s middle portion breaks in a more free-flowing last third, with Kiki entering a new type of orbit within Alex’s gravitational pull. Of course, the true heartbreak comes when she begins to defend Alex’s behaviour, instead projecting per pain back onto herself, a further destructive cycle. Malone’s quiet presence in the background of the scenes is a reminder of the consequences of this pairing: yet-to-be-manifested intergenerational trauma, a weed desperate to be severed before it even begins to grow.
Cambourieu and Berlier’s semi-ascetic approach never scares the viewer away from feeling empathy for Kiki, but we are never meant to feel so deeply overwhelmed by anguish for her condition. Under a Bad Star is an unforgettable piece – not because it’s too agonising to forget, but because the weight of its reality stains the mind like a blood-red wine.
Under a Bad Star is a French production by L’Heure d’été in co-production with Réalviscéralisme and Les Films du Chou. Urban Sales holds the rights to its world sales.
