Venice 2026: Koreeda’s ‘Look Back’ Disappoints, el-Toukhy’s ‘Woman Unknown’ Provokes, Moretti Surprises

Venice keeps trudging along. Twelve of the 21 films in competition have now been screened. Tomorrow, we’ll get to see Casey Affleck’s “Company,” Florian Zeller’s “Bunker,” and Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s “DAU.”

The highlights of the competition for me are Lee Chang-dong’s “Possible Love,” Martin McDonagh’s “Wild Horse Nine.” After those, Lance Oppenheim’s “Primetime,” and Nanni Moretti’s “It Will Happen Tonight” — yes, I actually liked a Moretti, the first one I’ve truly been fond of since “Mia Madre” in 2015. It’s a beautiful, old-school romance, and if it is in fact his final film, it’s a wonderful way to bow out.

I’m mixed on Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Look Back,” a beautifully shot story about adolescence, creativity, and the fleeting nature of youth that never quite develops the emotional or dramatic weight its ambitions demand. This is an expansion of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s acclaimed one-shot manga, which has two young girls, Fujino and Kyomoto, who share a passion for drawing manga, becoming close friends and creative partners, inspiring each other through their love of art. Yuta Bandoh’s sentimental score further hammers home the obvious emotional cues.

A notch better, though too stretched out, is May el-Toukhy’s “Woman Unknown,” the only film directed by a woman in competition. It’s a bleak, elegantly controlled postwar Danish drama-thriller that channels the paranoid atmosphere of Hitchcock’s “Rebecca.” Mathilde Arcel is excellent as Marie, a woman whose wartime past threatens the carefully constructed life she has built as she nannies a widower’s home. The symbolism and psychodrama become overly obvious in the final stretch, but it’s still honestly far better than many of the films competing for the Golden Lion.

Take, for example, Andrea Pallaoro’s “The Echo Chamber,” based on Bernardo Bertolucci’s final screenplay, a suffocating chamber drama starring Luca Marinelli, Alicia Vikander, and Susan Sarandon. The film centers on a couple whose relationship and personal struggles unfold largely within the confines of their home. And that’s the problem. The confined setting, two-plus-hour runtime, and slow pace eventually become exhausting.

Another misfire is Cédric Kahn’s “A Place to Heal,” which takes place in an adolescent neuropsychiatric ward. It all feels like déjà vu. There’s the bulimic, the anorexic, the trans teenager, the nymphomaniac, the possessed, the depressed — the entire checklist is marked off. The young actors are not to be faulted here, and Kahn (“The Goldman Case”) is a dependable craftsman, but too many cases do not make a story, and neither does overloading your film with caricature.

Beyond these, it’s been a fairly uneven ride, with several films struggling under their own ambitions. There are still nine films to go, of course, so plenty can change.