Apparently, the world is a less political place than it was. That’s what you might have concluded, given how Cannes kicked off this year. In the last edition’s opening ceremony, Robert De Niro accepted his lifetime-achievement Palme d’Or by delivering an impassioned anti-Trump polemic, while in 2022, Volodymyr Zelensky made a surprise appearance by satellite. Over the last few years, the urgency of world affairs has been very tangible at Cannes, sometimes addressed in highly specific terms.

This year, by contrast, things were a little more veiled. Actress Eye Haïdara, hosting the opening ceremony, welcomed “internet users around the world—or rather, everywhere where the internet hasn’t been cut off.” And Jane Fonda, inaugurating the festival officially, sounded a rallying cry: “I believe in the power of voices—voices on the screen, voices off the screen, and definitely voices on the street, especially now.” But again, nothing was too specific.

By contrast, the competition jury’s opening press conference struck a tougher tone, with Ken Loach screenwriter Paul Laverty warning about corporate control of A.I. and condemning Hollywood’s blacklisting of Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo, and others for being outspoken about Israel’s war on Gaza. One hesitates to suggest that this week’s opening ceremony was the result of a deliberate toning-down policy on the festival’s part—perhaps to avoid the sort of heated political controversy that has defined the Berlinale over the last couple of years. But overall, this year’s gala—including the woolliest of acceptance speeches by lifetime achievement–honoree Peter Jackson—was a fairly insipid one.

So far—I’m writing on Thursday, the festival’s third day—there has been little on screen to suggest fire, fury, and unrest. Much of what we’ve seen has been familiar—reassuringly or depressingly. The opening film came in a register of cozy nostalgia, as it so often does. Pierre Salvadori’s The Electric Kiss (La Vénus électrique), set in the 1920s, is a contrived romantic comedy about a fairground performer (Anaïs Demoustier) who poses as a medium and helps a blocked painter (Pio Marmaï) connect, or so he thinks, with the spirit of his dead wife. As the deceased, Vimala Pons is the best thing in the film, herself channeling the spirit of Jules and Jim–era Jeanne Moreau to buoyant effect. Otherwise, it’s the kind of confection that French viewers are likely to label sympa—nice enough—with an indulgent shrug.

By contrast, we’ve already seen one French-made film that was the best kind of crowd-pleaser—charming, soulful, and devised with artisanal passion. Directed by Phuong Mai Nguyen, In Waves, opening Critics’ Week, is an animated feature that convincingly accesses the Californian iconography of surfing, skateboarding, and beachside romance. Based on A.J. Dungo’s autobiographical graphic novel, it follows teenage skater A.J. as he meets accomplished surfer Kristen and is initiated by her into the thrill of catching a wave. They catch a romantic wave too, until their happiness is endangered by her life-threatening illness. The animation is beautifully multi-textured, with simple characterization and a range of more complex effects—especially the water, from waves to teardrops.

One of the festival’s hottest tickets has been the new feature from Jane Schoenbrun, who established an auteur stamp from the start, making films—We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), I Saw the TV Glow (2024)—that are unadulterated personal visions derived from the director’s own obsessions. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, opening Un Certain Regard, pursues that signature on a bigger scale. Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, a young queer director and “Sundance wunderkind,” hired by a studio to revive a once-beloved slasher franchise. With a head full of noble intentions and deconstructive-critical concepts, she sets out to the snowy heights to visit Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the final girl from the original movie, who is now a recluse—but not, Billy insists, Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard (1950). That’s what she claims, at least. But then this stately, stylized Southern belle has chosen to live on the set of her old movie (an “abandoned sleepaway camp”—hello, Scooby-Doo). Can it be long before indestructible killer Little Death makes an appearance with his spear and his ventilator-unit helmet?

A lot of people will have a blast with Teenage Sex and Death…, as Schoenbrun and their stars manifestly do. As a cinephile intellectual juggling the often contradictory pleasures of thrill and theory, Kris is clearly an avatar of the director, who so pushes the self-reflexive dimension that the film spends a lot of time fondly critiquing its own meta-ness. The winking even extends to the casting of Einbinder as Kris, whose relationship with Billy is essentially a hyper-eroticized variant of her partnership with Jean Smart on the TV series Hacks.

Anderson is terrific, unleashing reserves of crazy ripeness that we’ve never seen before. But if you’re not committed to heritage gore or ironic hyper-kitsch, you may be left cold. There’s a superb credits sequence, outlining the history of the Camp Miasma franchise in a dizzy montage of DVD cases and press cuttings. Then Einbinder and Anderson carry you along nicely for a while, before the film spirals increasingly into the icy depths of Lake Miasma. Or up its own meta-critical fundament.

Finally, for now, the first real Palme d’Or contender: Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland. It’s the third black-and-white feature about 20th-century Europe from the Polish director of Ida (2013) and Cold War (2018), and the most heavyweight, although the film’s brilliance lies in its ability to combine seriousness of content and lightness of texture. Set in Germany in 1949, it follows novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) as the Nobel laureate, now an American citizen, returns to Germany to receive literary honors on both sides of the newly divided nation. Dense with cultural and historical references, it’s also an essay on father-child relations, with Erika—an accomplished writer, actor, and war reporter—playing attentive factotum to her father, while her brother, novelist Klaus (August Diehl), succumbs to his own despair.

Co-written by Pawlikowski and Henk Handloegten, this is a film of ideas and words, many of those in an unashamedly severe register. At Cannes, I often find myself struggling with the literary tone of the more ambitious “statement films”—and I can imagine Thomas Mann’s works as models for the kind of cine-novels some directors aspire to. But Pawlikowski has evaded that impasse beautifully: his film unfurls fluidly, and at a crisp 82 minutes.

Hüller, always compelling, is at her best—quiet but barbed, with a honed inner edge of defiance—as a woman who seems to have embraced daughterly subservience in response to the spiritual exhaustion occasioned by war and exile. Łukasz Żal’s photography has a dappled, luminous grace that elevates the realist period evocation, finding beneath the rubble and brutalist concrete some residue of the Romantic-era grace of Goethe’s bygone world. Right up to its gorgeously direct ending, set to a Bach organ piece, Fatherland is at once simple and a very special achievement—not just a serious film but one that dares to take seriousness itself seriously.