POLA X Leos Carax

POLA X marks a violent rupture in Leos Carax’s career. Loosely adapted from Herman Melville’s novel Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, the film follows a young novelist whose ordered bourgeois life collapses after the arrival of a mysterious woman claiming to be his half-sister. What begins as familial disruption spirals into obsession, exile, and self-destruction.

Carax strips away the romanticism of his earlier films. The pacing is punishing. Scenes extend past comfort. Sound overwhelms dialogue. Guillaume Depardieu delivers a raw, physically demanding performance that anchors the film’s descent. The camera refuses distance, forcing the viewer to remain inside emotional and psychological breakdown. Nothing is softened or explained.

The film’s premiere at Cannes was famously hostile. Audiences booed. Critics were sharply divided. Yet POLA X has since been reappraised as a crucial turning point, both for Carax and for late-1990s European cinema. It announces a filmmaker no longer interested in charm or lyricism, but in confrontation. Difficult, exhausting, and uncompromising, POLA X is cinema that insists on discomfort as its central experience.