Any horror nut will tell you not to have sex without anticipating trouble, but what makes Arthur Harari’s The Unknown (L’Inconnu) so mesmerizingly unsettling is that calling this sui generis freakout horror or sci-fi or even fantasy seems simplistic. There’s a surface kinship here with films like It Follows and especially Under the Skin, in which post-coital afterglow sours fast. But the director declines to get too specific about his allegorical intent, which could be sexual trauma or gender identity or just a mysterious body-snatcher nightmare. Either way, this is a spellbinding psychological puzzler led by a typically fearless performance from Léa Seydoux.
Citing influences from Kafka to Antonioni, Harari has less interest in providing definitive answers to the film’s enigma than in exploring existential questions of metamorphosis, transformation, erasure and displacement. He could also be commenting on our growing disconnect from reality — social, political, cultural, spiritual, sexual — to the point where we no longer recognize ourselves. The kind of alienation the movie depicts seems entirely germane to the churning anxieties of our age of hyper-connectivity, as does nostalgia for simpler times in which self-reflection wasn’t quite so punishing.
