This article appeared in the May 23, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

I Only Rest in the Storm (Pedro Pinho, 2025)

Receiving the Best Actress award at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival for her role in Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, Juliette Binoche held up a sign bearing the name of Kiarostami’s frequent collaborator Jafar Panahi, the Iranian writer-director who had just begun a hunger strike in prison, having been jailed for making “propaganda against the Islamic Republic.” So began Panahi’s long-running legal battle, which would include subsequent prison stints, house arrest, a ban on international travel, and an official filmmaking prohibition flaunted in five ingenious features from 2011’s This Is Not a Film to 2022’s No Bears. In early 2023, Panahi walked out of Evin Prison after his original conviction was overturned on appeal; this week, he walked the red carpet in Cannes for the first time since 2003. It’s a full-circle moment: Binoche is the president of this year’s Competition jury, responsible for assessing the merits of Panahi’s new movie.

The film of a free man, It Was Just an Accident engages explicitly with the abuses of the carceral system that ensnared Panahi and many others. The accident of the title—an unseen dog lands under the wheels of a car, setting the plot in motion—leads a driver (Ebrahim Azizi) to a garage. There, former political prisoner Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), hearing the distinctive squeak of the man’s prosthetic limb, believes him to be the sadistic officer called “Peg Leg,” who tormented him and others during their sentences. Vahid abducts him off the street, stuffs him into a wooden chest in the back of his van, and drives him out to the desert to bury him alive. But the man denies being Peg Leg—and Vahid, who was blindfolded in prison, never saw his antagonist’s face. Besides, the driver has a young daughter and a pregnant wife. The enigma of the faceless enemy and the queasy specter of retributive violence lead to predicaments that are epistemological and moral in nature. With what degree of certainty can Vahid know what he knows, and what burden of proof is sufficient to act on? What should he do with his captive, and what would constitute justice? Uncertain on all counts, Vahid enlists the help of other former inmates, who stake out starkly opposing positions across long drives in the increasingly crowded van, each argument informed by memories of beatings, verbal humiliations, mock executions, and sexual violations.

A philosophical odyssey playing out behind the windshield, It Was Just an Accident is an accomplished road movie—the axiomatic genre of the Iranian New Wave, for which the car is both a bubble of privacy and a literal vehicle for exploration. As the Pirandellian ensemble talk in circles and the man in the box stirs, Panahi draws out moments of absurdist comedy and existential urgency, building to a climactic single-take interrogation, a cathartic aria that’s been forthcoming since long before the cameras started rolling.

More trauma resurfaces in Alpha, the latest from 2021 Palme d’Or–winner Julia Ducournau (Titane), when the 13-year-old title character (Mélissa Boros) comes home from a party with a stick-and-poke tattoo: a jagged “A” that occasionally bleeds scarlet. She can’t remember if the needle was sterilized, which sends her doctor mother (Golshifteh Farahani) into a fury and triggers flashbacks to a decade prior, when she worked at a hospital overwhelmed by an incurable new blood-borne plague. Adolescent Alpha’s room has Tupac and Nas posters, and Farahani’s hair frizzes with ’80s voluminousness in the flashbacks, setting the film roughly across the peak and early abatement years of the AIDS crisis. The unnamed disease in Alpha turns its victims gradually to stone: first patches of skin, then entire limbs become a silver-blue marble, like a negative image of an anatomical diagram; the afflicted move with a haunting, gentle slowness and cough clouds of dust. Even after a blood test shows no signs, mom still fears Alpha has contracted it—this brush with the illness is especially triggering because her brother Amin (Tahar Rahim), an intravenous-drug addict who used throughout the height of the epidemic, has returned to live with her and Alpha after several years of absence. The last time Alpha met her uncle, she was too young to have retained any memory of him; when he shows up at the apartment, she threatens him with a kitchen knife.

Though Ducournau sustains a pummeling tone (the actors seem to be screaming to be heard over a thunderous soundtrack), Alpha is less gory than Ducournau’s previous body-horror films, but no less extreme for it. The 41-year-old director shows AIDS through the eyes of a ’90s kid: the physical symptoms are repulsive and terrifying, and transmission has something to do with salacious adult activities like sex and drugs; at Alpha’s school, this vague, visceral understanding trickles down into homophobic bullying, social ostracization, and cruel innuendos about faculty members rumored to be gay. (Finnegan Oldfield plays a teacher carrying a pain he chokes back in front of his students.) These kids were born too late to understand the disease except as a secondhand terror that’s already fading away with better treatments. With Alpha, Ducournau picks obsessively at the emotional scabs of AIDS, as if to let them heal over would be to forget the wound.

Now, a short word on a long film, Pedro Pinho’s three-and-a-half-hour Un Certain Regard selection I Only Rest in the Storm. Portuguese civil engineer Sérgio (Sérgio Coragem) arrives in Guinea-Bissau to conduct an environmental-impact study for a proposed road, continuing the work of an Italian predecessor who abandoned the project under mysterious circumstances. It’s a Graham Greene plot for the World Bank era, complete with a bribery offer and attractions that challenge the callow protagonist’s assumptions—in this case, to local woman Diára (Cleo Diára) as well as to her best friend, the statuesque queer Brazilian Gui (Jonathan Guilherme). A feckless naïf who leaves roadkill in a communal fridge, Sérgio generates awkward comic friction wherever he goes: to Bissau’s nightclubs; to villages performing traditional rituals for back-patting aid workers in matching T-shirts; to an energy plant in the desert and the brothel where its European contractors blow off steam. I Only Rest in the Storm’s caustic thesis, about the legacy of colonial violence that persists in the development agenda, emerges from scenes of labor, partying, and explicit sex that Pinho, a former documentarian, stages with a verité density; the film is an open world through which the viewer is encouraged to wander freely. The longest film at this year’s Cannes is less a test of endurance than of attention, which it amply rewards.

Mark Asch is the author of Close-Ups: New York Movies and a contributor to Reverse Shot, Screen Slate, Filmmaker Magazine, The Criterion Collection, and other publications.