What goes around mostly just goes around, goes around, and goes around once more in “Karma,” a sometimes engrossing but indulgently drawn-out affair given the veneer of luxury trash by all-in performances from Marion Cotillard and Dénis Menochet. Directed by Guillaume Canet with the same compulsive genre gloss he brought to the international hit “Tell No One” a full 20 years ago, this fusion of solemn psychological thriller and ripely ludicrous melodrama boasts a lurid, grabby premise — opening on the puzzling case of a child’s disappearance in Spain that eventually leads across the border to a cultishly secretive, definitely incestuous commune in southwest France. The storytelling, however, is padded and repetitive, meaning this 149-minute movie never quite takes escapist flight, while also remaining hard to take altogether seriously.
Premiering out of competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, “Karma” should do healthy home-turf business when it opens this October in France — where, as the last film made by national golden couple Canet and Cotillard prior to their 2025 separation, it carries an additional tabloid-level interest factor. Internationally, however, the film’s distribution prospects rest largely on Cotillard, also burdened with the heaviest dramatic lifting to do as the stricken, unworldly protagonist who bridges the film’s two improbably connected realms.
