Cannes 2026 Competition Features Fatherland and Parallel Tales

This year’s Competition program at the Cannes Film Festival is filled with familiar names, including Pedro Almodovar, James Gray, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Two international auteurs were slated early in the festival, promising an intellectually invigorating start to the year’s battle for the Palme d’Or. Only one fulfilled that promise, and even that’s with a few reservations.

Pawel Pawlikowski brings his formally rigid yet strikingly beautiful sense of composition to the story of Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) in Frankfurt in 1949, where he’s been asked to attend an event in a post-WWII Germany still seeking its identity. In the film’s fantastic one-shot opening scene, Mann’s son, Klaus (August Diehl), lays out many of the themes that follow in a phone call with his sister, Erica (Sandra Huller). Thomas and Erica now live in the States, but what does their return to Germany (after fleeing in 1933) mean to their family, reputation, and the country? Is Thomas Mann a “Good German,” and what space is there for culture or intellectualism in a place that’s literally still in rubble? With the West run by the Americans, as Klaus asks, do they choose Hitler or Mickey Mouse?

After the prologue, “Fatherland” is almost precisely divided into two as Erica, who serves as her father’s assistant, travels with Thomas to the two halves of Germany, starting in Frankfurt in the West and moving to Weimar in the East. The U.S. largely controls the former, and a press conference on Mann’s arrival highlights some of the thorny issues surrounding his visit. Is he a returning hero to a people who might argue that he betrayed them by fleeing in the first place? In a place that has seen all of its systems destroyed to the point that it is being controlled by its former adversary on one side and remnants of the Nazi party on the other, what role does a man who preaches the importance of Art have? Does culture matter to the defeated?

Working again with “Ida” and “Cold War” cinematographer Lukasz Zal, “Fatherland” has a painterly visual language, once again finding compositions that could hang in galleries, but this drama feels icier than the others, a vision of a place without warmth. To inject some humanity into it, Pawlikowski plays a little loose with history and crafts a family drama around the reveal that Klaus won’t be attending the event with his twin and father because he’s taken his own life after that prologue. Huller then becomes the gateway into the drama: a vision of a woman processing the cost of what a war they weren’t even directly involved in has exacted on her family. The Oscar nominee for “Anatomy of a Fall” is predictably stellar, making the most of every subdued emotional beat. She’s the reason alone to see it.

“Fatherland” is surprisingly short, clocking in at around 80 minutes with credits, and that gives it almost the sense of a short film idea that never found a way to expand into a feature. I loved how the Manns are almost interrogated in Frankfort but serenaded by literal choirs praising their existence in the part of the country less ready to ask the tough questions, yet it feels like “Fatherland” ends just as the film is starting to simmer these themes. Maybe it’s intentional to keep the audience in a sort of intellectual purgatory, reflecting two people grappling with the complexity of not just their own individual and family legacies but the entire country’s.

There are no easy answers in “Fatherland,” which makes it a bit less satisfying narratively, but I think also means it will have the freedom to bounce around in the minds of viewers more than a film concerned with tighter conclusions.

Bouncing around is a good phrase to use to describe Asghar Farhadi’s deeply disappointing “Parallel Tales,” the first true heartbreaker of Cannes 2026. An incredible ensemble of living French legends that includes Isabelle Huppert, Vincent Cassel, Virginie Efira, and Catherine Deneuve can’t salvage a borderline incoherent script from Farhadi, who uses Krzysztof Kieslowski’s sixth chapter of “Dekalog” (“A Short Film About Love”) as the basis for a convoluted tale of intersecting characters who live across from each other on a Parisian street.

As the people at the center of “Parallel Tales” start to feel increasingly inconsistent, the mind wanders to the fact that this film about two brothers who make movies has a narrative foundation that pivots on an act of plagiarism, of which the filmmaker was acquitted in 2022. Perhaps the most interesting reading of the first word in the title is how this story could be read as parallel to the recent drama surrounding the man who made it. Sadly, it’s a more interesting way to unpack the film than to do so directly.

Huppert plays a writer named Sylvie, whose niece Celine (India Hair) brings home a young man named Adam (Adam Bessa) to help her pack up her old apartment before they sell it. Adam meets Celine after he stops a pickpocket on a train, which leads her to believe he can be trusted. Sylvie is a writer, and she’s been spying on the beautiful people across the street, turning her impressions of their lives into fiction.

In Sylvie’s version, there’s infidelity, double crosses, and even murder, but the truth is that these neighbors are significantly more mundane than that. When Adam takes credit for Sylvie’s novel, and it ends up in the hands of the people who inspired it, lines start to blur, and the emotional undercurrents of the fiction start to surface in reality.

Across from Sylvie is an apartment used as a sound studio by a filmmaker named Nicolas (Cassel, easily the film’s MVP), who works with his brother Theo (Pierre Niney) and a foley artist named Nita (Efira), Nicolas’ partner. They spend their days crafting fake sounds for what looks like nature footage, which feels like a commentary on how nothing is real, not even the sound of the bird wings flapping in a film, but, like so much of the script, it never really connects to anything.

Farhadi can never seem to find the right temperature in “Parallel Tales,” alternating between half-baked ideas that are never as resonant as their intent and overcooked character beats. Bluntly, these people feel as real as Nita’s Foley work, reducing them all to devices in an overwrought piece of storytelling.

He will bounce back; let’s hope Cannes does soon, too.