‘A Good Little Soldier’ review: A magnetic Alba Rohrwacher anchors Stéphane Brizé’s study of toxic workplace culture

Dir: Stéphane Brizé. France. 2026. 101mins

American poet Robert Frost once wrote that ’By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day’. Stéphane Brizé’s powerful, coruscating denunciation of today’s toxic corporate workplace culture posits that, compared to now, those were the good old days. It’s anchored by Alba Rohrwacher’s magnetic central performance as an under-pressure HR executive, and balances screw-tightening drama with a rich vein of comedy.

 Balances screw-tightening drama with a rich vein of comedy

This is the fourth of the French director’s films that centre on the indignity of work in our market-driven world, following Another World (2021), At War (2018) and The Measure of a Man (2015). A confident, stylish, deeply cinematic film, it’s likley to be the widest seen of the four following its premiere in Venice competition. While France will remain its primary market, arthouse bookings in other territories could also follow. 

A Good Little Soldier lays its cards on the table in an exhilarating opening credit sequence which plays out to the driving chords of Joey Ramone’s punk take on the Louis Armstrong classic ’What A Wonderful World’. Set entirely in and among the high-rise office blocks of the Parisian business district of La Defense, the film uses its widescreen format inventively to evoke not breathing space but its opposite: oppression, compression, suffocation.

It’s structured around a series of long scenes set mainly in the offices of the insurance company office for which Carla (Rohrwacher, also leading Horizons title A Common Story) has just been taken on as HR manager. The first, a satirical classic for the ages, takes place during the presentation of a newly-commissioned corporate video that cheesily virtue-signals the company’s record on inclusiveness. Its comic charge is carried by Vincent Lindon’s pugnacious CEO Arnaud, who rounds on his team after they have all played safe by mouthing pious platitudes about the film.

Lindon is Brizé’s go-to leading man and those who followed his blistering performances in the director’s previous ‘workplace’ films, where he played a sometimes lower, sometimes higher cog in the system, will get enormous pleasure – as the actor himself appears to be doing – from the savage gusto with which he tears into his role of an irascible company tyrant at the very top of the pyramid.

A screenplay by Brizé, Coralie Amedeo and Olivier Gorce sets this wider exposure of corporate hypocrisy against the personal journey of Carla as her bosses force her to cover-up the bullying behaviour of a middle-management colleague. An insecure young woman in an aggressive, male-dominated world, who has learned to transmit an illusion of strength and confidence, she internalizes performance stress and passes it on to her young son, who we see only in a series of video calls. She sometimes leaves the office, invariably as dusk is falling, but we never see her at home.

Numbers – in the form of employee performance ratings – are more important than ethics inside this company. And numbers also take the form of the maths homework Carla’s son is struggling with, as she remains unaware of the compassion and care he needs from her. A touchy-feely ‘happiness manager’ is brought in to motivate employees, but when he asks for examples of a moment of joy they experienced in the previous 24 hours, none come forward. Eventually one offers that when she arrived for work that morning, she didn’t have to wait ages for the lift.

The narrative’s dramatic edge is honed by Antoine Heberle’s droll, documentary-style handheld camerawork, which works with the flat lighting and subdued colour palette to situate the viewer somewhere between sympathy, irony and appalled fascination. Bertrand Blessing’s spare soudtrack, consisting initially only of snare-drum trills and clusters, keeps the tension high, making those office chairs feel like beds of nails.