Themes emerge at film festivals, reflections of international anxieties and concerns collected in art. An early topic of conversation at Cannes 2025 has been violence against women, but my personal program seems to have pulled me to stories of children in jeopardy or times of crises (maybe because I have three boys of my own). The kids are not alright in three films, one of which could become a modest arthouse hit for its debut filmmaker.
Charlie Polinger dives into familiar waters with his bullying drama “The Plague” but he does so with confident direction of young performers and an ability to wring tension even with a story that is on a relatively predictable rail. Newcomer Everett Blunck is fantastic as Ben, a kid in a water polo training program (taught by a typically strong Joel Edgerton), one of those places that parents send their kids for a few weeks, usually in the summer. Ben and his puberty-driven colleagues are 12-13 years old and it’s 2003—so you can see where this is going. (I mention the year because as a parent of kids in the 2020s, bullying is such a common topic with teachers, administrators, and instructors that it feels like the period is essential to engaging with this one accurately—and I missed it at first so don’t make the same mistake).
Ben is clearly an empathetic young man, conveyed through Blunck’s concerned approach to another kid named Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), one who the group has determined has “the plague.” Every time he comes near them, they run away screaming. They wash vigorously if he touches them. And to be fair, Eli does have a skin condition that a pre-teen might find disturbing, but Polinger almost suggests that it’s a product of bullying instead of the other way around. Cruelty can give you hives.
Whatever the reason, Eli, who is socially awkward to begin with, becomes a target of incessant bullying, much of it coordinated by the smirking Jake (future star Kayo Martin). At first, Ben struggles with what to do, knowing that defending Eli will make him a target too. Viewers know where this is going. After all, bullies don’t usually settle on one victim for long.
The familiar road markers in “The Plague” are broken up by Polinger’s stylish direction—he employs Johan Lenox’s score like he’s making a horror film and gets a lot of mileage out of imposing underwater shots of young legs kicking to stay above water—and, even more so, the young cast. Some of the “youth dialogue” from the group feels overly scripted, but Blunck and Martin pull the film back every time it threatens to embrace its clichés. Blunck understands what it’s like to be caught between what you know is right and what you might need to do to survive; Martin is careful not to excuse Jake’s awful behavior, but we can see the broken child in him too.
I wish Polinger allowed them to be even more complex—does the bully have to be from a broken home and the bullied have to be a vegetarian because it’s mean to eat animals?—but he proves with this debut that he’s got something to say and the filmmaking chops to say it. Despite my nitpicks with this one, I don’t think I’ll see a more promising debut at this Cannes.
Although I wouldn’t object to anyone giving that same proclamation about Diego Céspedes and his ambitious “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo.” The rare Chilean film to ever make the Cannes line-up, “Flamingo” uses the AIDS crisis to comment on found families in a way that feels almost supernatural and mystical. It’s about obsession and division, how people can be drawn together and forced apart by things they don’t understand like passion and even disease. It’s a bit repetitive, often feeling like a better short pulled to feature length, but Céspedes definitely has a voice worth hearing and an eye worth seeing.
In a truly crazy coincidence, “Flamingo” also features “The Plague,” as we’re introduced to our hero, a 12-year-old named Lidia (Tamara Cortés) as she’s being bullied with the same game in her Chilean desert hometown in 1982. Lidia appears to be the only girl in this town that’s occupied by dumb boys, male miners, and a home of drag queens. The miners come to this bar/home to watch people like Flamenco (the captivating Matías Catalán) perform, riveted by her presence even as they often violently rebel against their attraction to her and her fellow performers. The miners believe that if they look too long into the eyes of someone like Flamenco then they will get a disease like the one killing her sexual partner Yovani.
Given the setting and subject, the AIDS allegory is obvious, but it’s also used in a less definitive way to comment on forbidden obsession, blaming the object of desire instead of the person who desires. It’s also worth remembering that this is a story told from the POV of a 12-year-old girl, one who is equally enraptured by Flamenco in her own way. Of course, something as striking as Flamenco in a location as desolate as Lydia’s village would have to be downright supernatural.
“The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo” runs out of new ideas before long, but Céspedes and his cast have earned enough goodwill by that point to hold the viewer. It’s another debut that’s more promising than anything else, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the next Chilean film to play Cannes was also by Céspedes.
Finally, there’s a filmmaker who is no stranger to the international festival circuit, Fatih Akin. Since he premiered the phenomenal “Head-On” in Berlin in 2004 and won the Golden Bear for what is still his best movie, Akin has been lauded at European film festivals. “The Edge of Heaven” and “In the Fade” both won prizes at Cannes. So why is his “Amrum” premiering out of competition? One can never truly know how these decisions are made, but it could be because it’s simply not very good.
Akin actually adopted this story from his friend Hark Bohm, a filmmaker who wrote a sprawling screenplay based on his own childhood in the island community of Amrum during the waning days of World War II. Bohm’s stand-in is an empathetic child named Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck) whose mother has just given birth. As she recovers, she dreams of bread and honey, which Nanning sets about acquiring in a time when resources for such things are in scant supply.
“Amrum” becomes a story of a tireless act of kindness in a tiringly cruel world as Akin is constantly reminding us of the horrors around Nanning, whether it’s natural ones like hunting for seals or unnatural ones like the body of a dead soldier that washes ashore. How can a big-hearted child possibly make it in a place like this?
The root of the problem is that Akin shoots his coming-of-age tale with lush compositions that undermine any potential veracity. It’s often gorgeous, but in a way that’s overly considered and precious. It’s too pretty for a story about such cruelty. (I’ve taken to calling it “Bel-fascist” not just to be glib but because I also felt Kenneth Branagh’s film was too manufactured.)
Akin details in the press notes how he employed his cinematic knowledge to blend his style with Bohm’s, pulling from films like “Bicycle Thieves,” “Shoeshine,” “The Night of the Hunter,” and “Stand by Me.” Maybe it’s not surprising that all of this cribbing leads to a film that never finds its own voice. Its heart is in the right place; it’s just not beating.
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