‘Another Day’ review: Adèle Exarchopoulos is the beating heart of Jeanne Herry’s naturalistic study of alcoholism

Dir. Jeanne Herry. France 2026. 120mins

Back in 2013, Adèle Exarchopoulos proved that she could more than handle the depiction of intense emotion with her career-making role in Blue is the Warmest Colour, the Cannes winner that saw her jointly awarded the Palme d’Or with director Abdellatif Kechiche and co-star Léa Seydoux. Thirteen years on as a sterling regular in French cinema (including work with Justine Triet, Quentin Dupieux and Léa Mysius, not to mention US director Ira Sachs), Exarchopoulos excels as the magnetic centre of Jeanne Herry’s Another Day, as a young actress struggling with alcoholism.

Exarchopoulos’s performance is perfectly in tune with the film’s anti-sensationalistic presentation of its theme

This is a compelling study in psychological realism from actor/director Jeanne Herry, her fourth feature after Number One Fan (2014), In Safe Hands  (2018)and 2023 ensemble piece All Your Faces, in which Exarchopoulos also appeared. Addressing potentially harrowing material with grace and propulsive pacing, the film should generate domestic heat when released by Studiocanal in September, while its lead’s art-house profile will surely bring Another Day and its writer-director plentiful attention internationally.

With a strong LGBTQ angle, this is a nonjudgemental, rhetoric-free drama about a young actress trying to keep her career and personal life on the rails while facing up to the reality of her alcoholism. Set over a few years of the last decade, the film follows Garance (Exarchopoulos), a young performer – she’s 36 by film’s end – with evident talent, energy to spare and an upbeat, outgoing character. She knows what she wants in life – certainly not, she decides early on, to be hampered by her deadbeat, would-be director boyfriend. But she’s treading water professionally, despite regular low-profile work with a stage troupe and roles she carries off with brio in their children’s shows (an upbeat solo song about dealing with life’s ups and downs is a winning standout).

But Garance’s drinking problem is slowing her down, making her erratic and gradually screwing up her career – even though she is firmly in denial, claiming that the booze is just part and parcel of the acting life. As she moves from apartment to apartment, and makes a whole crowd of new friends on the Parisian queer scene, her partying and the ensuing hangovers and blackouts begin to spell trouble that Garance is determined to ignore. Some of the people around her, however, do see it – notably her stage colleagues who finally kick her out of the troupe, and her new partner, production designer Pauline (Sara Giraudeau) who, after a long period of complicitly living with Garance’s addiction, eventually realises the time has come to face facts.

Exarchopoulos’s performance is remarkable for being so undemonstratively naturalistic, perfectly in tune with the film’s anti-sensationalistic presentation of its theme. Garance may be disoriented, or profoundly frazzled in some scenes – notably when she suffering panic attacks and waking delusions – but while pushing the register plausibly in these moments, Exarchopoulos otherwise keeps things on a very gentle even keel, her distinct deep silky tones and casual conversational rhythms keeping the emotional edge evident under the surface of restraint.

An excellent ensemble cast with a close-knit organic feel includes Mathilde Roehrich and Brigitte Sy as Garance’s sister and mother, plus actor and sometime rocker Jehnny Beth (Jacques Audiard’s Paris, 13th District) as the writer who eases Garance’s transition towards dating women. The various actors depicting the theatre milieu knit together nicely too – and Another Day offers a level-headed, non-mystificatory depictions of the acting profession. And Giraudeau, as Garance’s chalk-and-cheese other half, impresses in her shared moments with Exarchopoulos, as Pauline gradually realises that the woman she loves requires something steelier than just understanding and support.

What’s especially remarkable about Another Day (whose French title is Garance, an overt nod at the Arletty character in period classic Les Enfants du Paradis) is its pacing and crisply rhythmic editing. Herry crams in a huge amount of incident that seems to rush past us, sometimes hectically, sometimes with moments of measured calm, but mostly in very short sequences. The effect is to evoke the flow of often mundane everyday life on which Garance rides, and in which she’s sometimes engulfed Ultimately – as she must acknowledge sooner or later – time is running past her, faster than she can catch up. Whether or not this is an accurate depiction of an addict’s mindset, it certainly works very vividly here, absolutely immersing the viewer in Garance’s state of consciousness.