‘The Unknown’ Review: Disturbing, Bewitching Body Horror [London Film Fest]

Which sounds more upsetting: you suddenly inhabit someone else’s body, or somebody else suddenly starts strutting around in yours? David Zimmerman (Niels Schneider) isn’t allowed to choose between two extra-corporeal nightmares – when the nebbish Parisian photographer is dragged to an artsy party by his friends, he locks eyes with the only other person who came wearing an overcoat, played by an especially intense Léa Seydoux. She leads him to a basement, wordlessly initiates sex, and at the point of climax, she switches bodies with him. Out walks what looks like David, leaving David’s consciousness behind in a foreign, female body.

For the rest of The Unknown, David is played by Léa Seydoux, but it is certainly not the last we see of actor Niels Schneider. It’s hard to spoil the film’s mystery because so much of The Unknown’s gnawing, disturbing power comes from evoking the sense of mystery rather than a tightly designed plot. In fact, the plot is simple, the mystery is sprawling and inconclusive, and the film is all the better for it. Part psychological nightmare, part fantastical horror, The Unknown may remind us of doppelganger stalker chillers like It Follows, Enemy and Leviticus, but it is a potent, often overwhelming distillation of the body horror genre, albeit with none of its typical excretions and mutations.

David Zimmerman has clearly been an ongoing fascination for French director and co-writer Arthur Harari; The Unknown originated as a graphic novel titled The Case of David Zimmerman that Arthur wrote with his brother Lucas in 2024. That year, Harari won an Academy Award for co-writing Anatomy of a Fall with his partner Justine Triet, and he’s cashed in on his Oscar buzz with the year’s most unpleasant yet absorbing film. It’s both an existential puzzle about the body’s inseparability from identity, with no clean solution, like we’re gazing into the abyss from somebody else’s eyes, while the abyss gazes back from ours.

Even before the switch, Harari and cinematographer Tom Harari (another brother; what a bizarre family project) establish a surprising, paranoid style – crash zooms, sound cutting out, and intense perspective shots. This restless style is broken up with patient shots of still images of Parisian neighborhoods; faded images of riverbanks and buildings no longer standing. David is a (largely unemployed) photographer and is attempting to match his collection of old photos with present-day equivalents – a personal project charting the city’s relentless change that suits his lonely and voyeuristic demeanor.