Nino (2025)

When Pauline Loquès’ Nino premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival in May, it arrived with the kind of quiet intensity that doesn’t announce itself loudly but settles into your bones. The film had already earned recognition before its broader release—Théodore Pellerin took home the Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award at Cannes, a moment that signaled something genuine was happening on screen. By the time Nino hit wider release in September, it had already begun its conversation with audiences, and that conversation only deepened.

What makes this film matter isn’t spectacle or manipulation. It’s the opposite, really. In just 96 minutes minutes, Loquès constructs something deceptively simple: a story about a young man named Nino who’s been encouraged by his doctors to reconnect with the world after chemotherapy. Three days in Paris. One major challenge. That’s the premise, and if it sounds like it could drift into sentimental territory, the film stubbornly refuses to go there.

The creative partnership between Loquès and her lead actor Pellerin is what makes this work. There’s a vulnerability in Pellerin’s performance that doesn’t feel performed—it’s the kind of acting that makes you forget you’re watching acting at all. He moves through the streets of Paris with a specific kind of hesitation, someone who’s been broken open by illness and is trying to figure out how to be human again. It’s not about grand emotional gestures. It’s about the small reckonings, the moments where Nino has to decide whether to push himself further or retreat. Pellerin captures all of that with impressive restraint.

Alongside him, Salomé Dewaels and Jeanne Balibar bring complexity to their roles. They’re not there to coddle Nino or move the plot forward in predictable ways. Instead, they create friction, reality. There are conversations that feel like they’re actually happening between real people trying to navigate difficult terrain together. The ensemble never tips into melodrama, which is the real achievement here.

> The film earned a 7.4/10 rating from 39 votes, which might seem modest, but tells an interesting story about what happens when a drama prioritizes authenticity over broad appeal.

Loquès’ direction is understated but precise. She doesn’t try to make Paris look like a postcard version of itself. The city is just there—present, sometimes cold, sometimes offering small moments of warmth. Her camera stays close to Nino, letting us experience his re-entry into the world from his perspective. There’s no manipulation through sweeping shots or manipulative music choices. The emotional weight comes from what’s actually happening between the characters, not from how the filmmaking is trying to make us feel.

What’s particularly interesting about Nino in the context of contemporary cinema is that it resists the urge to be a “triumph” narrative. Many films about recovery or illness push toward some kind of victorious conclusion, a moment where the protagonist has “beaten” their situation. Nino is more honest than that. The challenge Nino faces isn’t something he can overcome through sheer willpower. It’s something he has to learn to live with, to negotiate with, to accept. That’s a harder kind of story to tell, and a harder kind of story to watch, but it’s also more true to how actual recovery works.

The film’s reception reflects this quality. Critics embraced it—it earned a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes—and audiences have responded thoughtfully, even if the overall numbers remain 39 votes reflect a smaller but dedicated viewership. Sometimes films don’t need massive audiences to matter. They need the right audiences, the ones willing to sit with discomfort and complexity.

There’s something to be said about a film that comes out in 2025 and doesn’t try to be everything to everyone. Nino knows what it is: a character study about a young man’s struggle to reconnect with life. It trusts that story. It trusts its actors. It trusts its audience to understand what’s at stake. That kind of confidence in simplicity, in the power of genuine human conflict, feels increasingly rare.

Looking ahead, what Nino might influence is how we approach stories about illness and recovery in cinema. Not as spectacle, not as inspiration porn, but as the complicated, unglamorous, deeply personal work that it actually is. Pellerin’s win at Cannes was well-deserved—he carries the entire film on his shoulders, and he does it with a kind of grace that suggests a real talent emerging. Loquès has created something that will likely find its audience slowly, through word of mouth and careful curation, the way the best films do.

This is filmmaking that trusts you to understand what matters without being told. In a cinema landscape often preoccupied with spectacle and sensation, that restraint is its own kind of power.