You Found Me

Imagine being a doctor who can’t even escape her patients after they’ve flatlined. That’s the high-concept tightrope Elsa walks every day, balancing a stethoscope in one hand and a spiritual "Exit" sign in the other. In You Found Me (2025), director Alice Vial takes the "I see dead people" trope, strips away the M. Night Shyamalan dread, and replaces it with a weary, Parisian sort of melancholy that eventually gives way to something surprisingly sweet. It’s a film that understands that the most haunting thing about life isn't necessarily the ghosts—it’s the fear of being seen by the living.

I caught this one on a rainy Tuesday afternoon while my neighbor was apparently auditioning for a heavy metal band in the apartment above me. The muffled drumming through the ceiling actually provided a strange, rhythmic heartbeat to a movie that is essentially about the lack of one.

A Ghost Who Forgot to Leave

At the center of this supernatural tangle is Magalie Lépine-Blondeau as Elsa. She plays the role with a wonderful, defensive brittleness. Elsa isn’t a gothic medium; she’s a professional who is deeply over the bureaucracy of the afterlife. She’s given up on dating because, frankly, it’s hard to stay present for a dinner companion when a 19th-century baker is standing in the corner of the bistro demanding to know where his flour went.

Enter Oscar, played by the endlessly charismatic Jonathan Cohen. If you’ve followed French comedy lately, you know Cohen specializes in a very specific brand of "confident idiot." Here, he dials it back just enough to be endearing. Oscar is dead, but he hasn’t quite checked his notifications yet. He’s wandering around with the oblivious swagger of a man who thinks he’s just having a really long, confusing day. When he encounters Elsa, the friction is immediate. She wants him to cross over; he wants to know why she’s the only person who won't stop staring at him. Jonathan Cohen is the only actor working today who can make "not knowing you're dead" look like a clumsy personality flaw rather than a cosmic tragedy.

The Rhythm of the Afterlife

Comedy is all about the "ping-pong" of timing, and Alice Vial (who co-wrote the script with Jean-Toussaint Bernard) leans heavily into the absurdity of Elsa’s double life. There’s a fantastic sequence involving a hospital board meeting where Elsa has to navigate a serious medical consultation while simultaneously shooing away a ghost who is trying to critique her bedside manner. The editing here is sharp, never lingering too long on the visual effects—which are Refreshingly lo-fi—and instead focusing on Lépine-Blondeau's increasingly frazzled facial expressions.

The film excels when it explores the "Fantasy" element through the lens of modern dating exhaustion. In a world of ghosting (the digital kind), Elsa is dealing with the literal kind. It’s a clever metaphor for the walls we build to protect ourselves from rejection. If Elsa never lets anyone in, she never has to explain her "gift," and she never has to lose anyone again. But Oscar, in his undead ignorance, represents the one thing she can’t ignore: a connection that doesn't care about the rules of biology.

The supporting cast, particularly Florence Janas as Inès and Soufiane Guerrab as Sofiane, provide much-needed grounding. They represent the "normal" world that Elsa is so desperate to inhabit, even as she’s constantly pulled into the ether. Anne Benoît also turns in a lovely, understated performance as Mireille, adding a layer of emotional weight that prevents the film from floating off into pure fluff.

Substance Over Spectacle

In an era where streaming services are often clogged with "high-concept" movies that feel like they were written by an algorithm trying to find the midpoint between Ghost and Amélie, You Found Me feels remarkably human. It was produced by Les films entre 2 et 4, a smaller outfit, and you can feel that indie sensibility in the cinematography by Julien Poupard. Paris doesn't look like a postcard here; it looks like a place where people—and spirits—actually live. The lighting is warm but honest, eschewing the over-saturated "rom-com glow" for something more atmospheric and moody.

There’s a bit of production trivia that I found fascinating: Alice Vial, who won an Oscar for her short film Les Bigorneaux, reportedly encouraged Jonathan Cohen to improvise much of Oscar's initial confusion. You can see it in his performance—that genuine, darting uncertainty in his eyes that feels less like "acting" and more like a man genuinely trying to figure out why he can’t feel the wind. This improvisational spark prevents the supernatural premise from feeling too "scripted" or clinical.

My only real gripe is that the third act leans a little too heavily into the expected tropes of the genre. There’s a "ticking clock" element regarding Oscar’s "fading" that felt a bit like it was pulled from a standard screenwriting manual. I would have been happy to just watch Elsa and Oscar argue about existentialism in a laundromat for another twenty minutes.

You Found Me is a charming, witty, and occasionally poignant look at the things we carry with us—and the things we need to let go of. It doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it gives it a very stylish, French spin. If you're tired of the loud, franchise-heavy landscape of mid-2020s cinema and want something that feels like a conversation with a smart friend, seek this one out. It’s a reminder that even when life (or death) is a mess, finding someone who actually "sees" you is the only thing that really matters.