Locarno Review: Denis Côté’s Nobody’s Violence Is an Astonishingly Alive Thriller

In 2006, Denis Côté was diagnosed with a degenerative kidney disease; in 2022, around the time he wrapped Mademoiselle Kenopsia, the insufficiency reached critical conditions: without a transplant—which he luckily received just a few months later—the Quebecois maverick wouldn’t have made it. Death had long haunted his cinema, a burgeoning oeuvre littered with acts of ferocious violence (see Vic + Flo Saw a Bear), sinister phantasms (think the residents of Ghost Town Anthology), and drifters who’ve traded civilization to roam a spectral no man’s land (like Wilcox’s titular vagabond). But no Côté feature feels as funereal as Nobody’s Violence, in which frequent collaborator Larissa Corriveau returns as Mira, a laconic wanderer who helps terminally ill people end their lives. Côté’s latest is a somber, lugubrious character study consistent with his previous, not just in shared personnel—this is now his fifth project starring Corriveau—but themes and tone. Like all its predecessors, this too furthers his career-long interest in loneliness and estrangement, but as far as its dramatic arc goes, it might stand as his most accessible.

Which isn’t to write_ Violence_ off as straightforward. The plot might be easy enough to sum up, but the film itself feels as anfractuous and mysterious as its leading lady. That’s in part because Côté doesn’t deal with backstories. His characters exist firmly in the present tense; who they are or what they did before they graced the screen are questions left deliberately unanswered, and if the silence might come across as jarring, especially for the newcomer, here it feels fitting._ Violence_ treats Mira as an enigma; that we leave knowing little more about her than we did at the beginning isn’t an indictment but a testament to the film’s confounding charm. Côté has cited Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin as a touchstone, and like Scarlett Johansson’s character, Corriveau’s is an exterminating angel shrouded in mystery. At the payroll of some cult-like gang of affluent bohemians led by one Ludo (Philippe Rebbot), she drives around Canada meeting people who’ve hired her to ease their passing—which she does through a brew she makes them drink in one big, fatal gulp.

The film’s episodic structure recalls its immediate predecessor, Paul, a portrait of a chronically online cleaning “simp” that shares with Violence the same non-judgmental approach toward its protagonist. Where the relatives of Mira’s patients-victims might object to her actions—as in an early and particularly heated rendezvous—Côté never does. Mira does what she does simply because she can, as she admits in a rare confession, but she’s no robot. The gig’s emotional debris soon catches up with her, and it takes a chance encounter with a young bloke named Pierric (Xavier Bergeron) to reawaken her lust for life. This is where Violence threatens to feel a little too neat, a pivot that can register as particularly odd for a director as fluent in the ambiguous as Côté. High, garrulous, happy-go-lucky Pierric is less a flesh-and-blood character than a sort of catalyst for Mira’s journey, a feeling that only heightens when the two cross paths for a second time in starkly different circumstances. But however predictable some of its plot beats might be, Violence willfully disorients.

Time moves elliptically. Edited by Terence Chotard, the film dances through the seasons at such dizzying and seamless speed as to jam your bearings. As Ludo’s coterie recount their dreams, Violence itself seems to morph into one, the border between what’s real and what’s imagined growingly porous. Côté has spoken of his filmmaking as a form of supernaturalism—a cinema that embraces the implausible and otherworldly in an attempt not to imitate reality but luxuriate in its secrets. Much of that, I suspect, owes to Vincent Biron’s 16mm cinematography, here toggling between Kodak and a lesser-known, much more unstable stock: Orwo. All the flares and scratches are not imperfections but evidence of a chronic, jolting restlessness; Violence might hinge on death, but its frames communicate an astonishing vitality.

Conversations around Côté’s oeuvre tend to focus on his penchant for liminal settings. From zoos (Bestiaire) to retreats (That Kind of Summer) to whatever those derelict buildings Corriveau watches over in Mademoiselle Kenopsia might once have been, his films often unfurl across transitional spaces—you can think of his as a cinema of passageways. But Violence exemplifies another cardinal motif: the human body itself, a theme that unites such disparate works as Paul and A Skin So Soft, a close-up look at the world of bodybuilders. Violence, a film about a woman who helps strangers bid farewell to their human vessels, can be an immensely sad watch, but it still charts a journey of self-discovery peppered with euphoric outbursts. Through the occasional sex and dancing and somersaults, Mira learns to own and use her body again, and Corriveau conveys so much through glances and gestures alone. In line with her previous Côté collaborations, she walks into Violence a watchful sentinel, an analogue for us viewers. “You’re unique,” she keeps being told, and Côté most certainly agrees, locating in her angular beauty much of the film’s mystique. If her dramatic arc can be relatively linear, the smile that brushes across her face by the end is no less earned or contagious for that. In a work that concerns itself more with sensation than sense, Corriveau effortlessly bends the film’s strange world to intersect her orbit. And Violence obeys.

Nobody’s Violence premiered at the 2026 Locarno Film Festival.