All Your Faces

In an era where big-screen tension is usually measured in megatons or multiverse-ending threats, Jeanne Herry’s All Your Faces (2023) makes a radical counter-proposal: the most high-stakes thing you can put in front of a camera is two people sitting in a room, finally telling each other the truth. There are no car chases here, no grand judicial speeches, and—refreshingly for a modern drama—no one is looking for a "gotcha" moment. Instead, we get a film that treats human empathy as a grueling, professional, and ultimately cinematic contact sport.

I watched this on my laptop while a neighbor was aggressively leaf-blowing outside for two hours, and honestly, the contrast between his mindless noise and the film’s precise, heavy silence was a weirdly perfect pairing. It reminded me that in a world full of shouting, listening is the real superpower.

The Mechanics of Mercy

The film plunges us into the world of Restorative Justice, a real-world French program where victims and offenders are brought together for supervised dialogue. It sounds like a recipe for a dry, "Issue of the Week" television special, but Herry avoids the trap by focusing on the sheer, exhausting process of it all. We follow two parallel tracks. One is a group session involving three victims of violent robberies—Nawelle (Leïla Bekhti), Sabine (Anne Benoît), and Grégoire—meeting three incarcerated offenders, Nassim (Dali Benssalah), Issa (Birane Ba), and Thomas.

The other track is more intimate and jagged: Chloé, a victim of incest, preparing to meet her brother/abuser who has just been released from prison. It’s a lot of emotional ground to cover, but the script is so tightly disciplined that it never feels like a soap opera. These characters aren't here to forgive and forget; they are here to reclaim the pieces of themselves that were stolen during the crime. It’s basically an Avengers movie where the superpowers are active listening and not crying every five minutes.

Faces as Special Effects

The title isn't a metaphor; it’s an instruction. Nicolas Loir’s cinematography stays tight on the performers, capturing every twitch of a lip or defensive shift in posture. When Leïla Bekhti is on screen, you can practically feel the jagged electricity of her trauma. She plays Nawelle with a hair-trigger defensiveness that feels incredibly authentic to anyone who has ever felt "stuck" in a bad memory.

Opposite her, Dali Benssalah provides a fascinating counterpoint. As Nassim, he manages to be both intimidating and profoundly fragile. There’s a scene where the group debates the "professionalism" of a heist that is genuinely funny, then heartbreaking, then terrifying within the span of three minutes. The facilitators—played with a wonderful, weary competence by Élodie Bouchez and Suliane Brahim—act as our proxies. They are the umpires in a game where the rules are constantly being rewritten by the participants’ pain.

The film excels because it respects the "work" of healing. It shows the awkwardness, the bureaucratic hurdles, and the moments where the dialogue fails completely. It’s a very contemporary brand of filmmaking—one that values representation not just in casting, but in the representation of complex psychological states that usually get flattened by Hollywood’s need for a "cathartic" ending.

Beyond the Therapy Room

What makes All Your Faces feel so vital right now is how it engages with our current culture of polarization. We live in a time of silos, where the "other" is usually just a profile picture we’ve already decided to hate. By forcing these two groups—those who took and those who were taken from—to sit in a circle and share a plate of cookies, the film asks a profound philosophical question: Is it possible to see the humanity in someone who has fundamentally broken your world?

It’s a "talky" movie, sure, but it’s never boring. The pacing is relentless. Herry understands that a well-timed "Why did you do it?" can have more impact than a building falling down. It challenges the "eye for an eye" mentality that dominates our cinematic diet, suggesting instead that the only way forward is through a messy, uncomfortable middle ground. If you find yourself checking your phone during the quiet parts, you’re missing the point—the quiet parts are where the real damage is being repaired.

The Chloé subplot provides the film’s most difficult moments. While the group sessions have a certain communal rhythm, Chloé’s journey is solitary and terrifying. It grounds the film, ensuring the Restorative Justice program doesn't look like a magic wand. It’s a slog. It’s painful. And for some, it might not work at all.

All Your Faces is a masterclass in ensemble acting and a reminder of what drama can do when it trusts its audience to sit still. It’s a film that demands your full attention and rewards it with a deep, resonating sense of hope that feels earned rather than manufactured. In a marketplace saturated with "content," this is something much rarer: a genuine human encounter. Don't let the subtitles or the "serious" subject matter scare you off; this is as gripping as any thriller released this year.