Dir: Denis Côté | Canada, Drama 2026
Denis Côté’s Nobody’s Violence approaches death not as spectacle or endpoint, but as a quiet administrative reality that sits uncomfortably close to everyday life. What interests the film far more than the act of dying is the fragile, often incoherent effort of continuing to exist. That tension gives the work its austere power, even as it occasionally drifts into opacity.
Larissa Corriveau plays Mira, a solitary figure who moves through different spaces performing what appears to be a discreet form of assisted death. She meets people who are exhausted, desperate, or simply ready to leave life behind, and she treats these encounters with a calm, almost procedural detachment. Côté avoids turning this premise into a genre framework. There is no investigative thread, no institutional backdrop, and no attempt to clarify the rules or ethics of Mira’s activity. Instead, the film follows her in a loose, episodic way, allowing situations to accumulate without being resolved into a larger narrative shape.
This approach is consistent with Côté’s broader and unique filmmaking style, where story is not a driving force but a surface on which gestures, silences, and atmospheres can unfold. Mira herself becomes defined less by psychology than by absence. Corriveau plays her with a striking restraint, offering very little emotional transparency. She is neither positioned as a moral agent nor as a figure of condemnation. Instead, she seems suspended, as if removed from the usual pressures that give a life its direction.
The film’s rhythm changes when Mira encounters a pair of forest-dwelling companions, Madeleine and Ludo, whose openness and physical ease contrast sharply with her controlled detachment. Later, a younger man enters her orbit, further destabilising the distance she maintains from others. These figures do not function as conventional supporting characters so much as interruptions—forces that reintroduce unpredictability, desire, and disorder into Mira’s carefully muted world.
What emerges is a quiet confrontation between two ways of being: one that treats existence as something to be managed or concluded, and another that insists on its immediacy, however chaotic or unresolved. Côté stages this not through dialogue or argument, but through bodies in space—how they move, hesitate, touch, or withdraw. Physical presence becomes the film’s central language.
The French title, Violence du corps de l’autre, points more directly to this concern than the English version. Violence here is not limited to harm; it also refers to the unavoidable impact of encountering another person in their physical reality. Other bodies are not abstract entities but reminders of vulnerability, dependence, and eventual decay. To be near someone is, in this sense, already a form of exposure.
At nearly two hours, the film resists conventional pacing. Côté is less interested in progression than in duration itself, in how long a moment can be held before it shifts into something else. Scenes often unfold with minimal emphasis, as if the camera is observing rather than directing attention. This creates a viewing experience that is deliberately uneven: at times hypnotic, at others resistant to engagement.
That resistance is both productive and limiting. Certain sequences gain a strange intensity precisely because they are not explained or resolved, allowing small gestures to carry unexpected weight. Elsewhere, however, the refusal to develop characters or situations more fully can feel like a withdrawal of dramatic responsibility. The film occasionally hovers near emotional depth without fully entering it.
Still, there is a discernible undercurrent that gradually becomes clearer. Côté developed the screenplay during a period of serious illness that preceded his kidney transplant in 2023, though the film avoids direct autobiographical framing. Rather than translating that experience into narrative confession, it seems to filter it into a broader meditation on suspension—on living in a state where neither continuation nor conclusion feels certain.
From this perspective, Nobody’s Violence can be seen as a film about uncertainty as a condition rather than a problem to be solved. Mira’s apparent certainty at the beginning slowly gives way to something more unstable: the possibility that purpose itself may not be fixed, and that drifting, hesitation, or even not-knowing might be closer to the truth of experience.
Côté feels very much at home in Ticino and his long-standing presence in international cinema, including his earlier recognition at Locarno, situates this work within a career defined by formal independence and narrative experimentation. Yet this film feels less like a continuation of a style than a quiet confrontation with fragility—both bodily and existential.
Ultimately, the film does not offer resolution or moral clarity. Instead, it leaves the viewer with a set of unresolved impressions: of bodies in proximity, of actions without clear justification, and of a world where meaning is constantly forming and dissolving. Its refusal to settle is precisely what defines it.
So a stark, elusive work that replaces narrative certainty with atmosphere and uncertainty, compelling in its restraint even when that restraint becomes distancing.
LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2026