‘Goodbye Cruel World’ review: ‘Anatomy Of A Fall’ star Milo Machado-Graner shines in dreamlike Cannes Critics’ Week closer

Dir: Felix de Givry. France/Belgium. 2026. 93 mins

Working in the register of a modern-day fairytale, actor Felix de Givry (the lead in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden) turns his hand to directing with this story of Otto (Milo Machado-Graner), a bullied teenager who, after a failed suicide attempt, hides out in the woods, and, later, in an unused annex in a hotel. After receiving the farewell letters he has mailed to classmates and family, the town comes to believe he is dead. 

Machado-Graner carries the emotional weight of the whole film almost entirely alone. 

While teenage mental health and social-media-age bullying inevitably hover over the film, they are not its primary concern. Instead, de Givry is more interested in the adolescent impulse to build an alternate world and retreat inside it. Otto initially appears intent on ending his life, but the film itself is less concerned with suicide than reinvention. 

Nor is it a practically-minded thriller about staging a disappearance. We are in fable mode here, and at points this register demands a certain willing suspension of disbelief. Although Goodbye Cruel World shares a number of narrative features with a quirky true crime documentary – mysterious disappearance, feverish manhunt, a romantic folie a deux – an audience that is interested in forensic clues and logical unlocking of a mystery may find themselves focuses on plausibility – to the detriment of the film’s tender, dreamlike qualities. 

What really makes Goodbye Cruel World sing is Machado-Graner’s performance. Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning 2023 legal drama Anatomy Of A Fall was so rich in screenplay, theme and Sandra Hüller’s towering lead turn that it was easy to overlook how finely calibrated Machado-Graner’s contribution was. He was pivotal there as the central couple’s 11-year-old son; here, he carries the emotional weight of the whole film almost entirely alone. 

The film would not get off the starting blocks if the central performance didn’t work. That’s not to say that anyone else is slacking, in particular, Jane Beever as Lena, the Wendy to Machado-Graner’s Peter, but if you don’t buy him, you don’t buy the film. Because the film screens as the Critics’ Week closing title rather than in competition, he is outside the section’s prize conversation; otherwise, he would have looked a strong prospect for Payal Kapadia’s jury. Casting directors are unlikely to overlook him after this.

The film also triumphs in its visuals and, in particular, its triumphant lighting design. De Givry and  cinematographer Tara-Jay Bangalter have an eye for a pleasing composition in any case, but a large number are partiularly elevated by a skilful mediation between light and dark. Whether it’s a bright white knife of moonlight splitting a bedroom tableau in half, or the artful play of torchlight reflected in a pair of desperate eyes peering through a rattan panel in a wardrobe, it’s not simply the case that every frame is a picturel it’s that these frames all feel like a series of interconnected pictures that make an intriguing whole.

Narration by Françoise Lebrun adds to the sense of a fireside story, and it would be interesting to see how the film would land with the narration removed – there are undeniably moments where it’s a little say-what-you-see. Nevertheless, it’s difficult not to have some respect for such a consciously unfashionable choice: narration in fiction features isn’t particularly in vogue in arthouse cinema, and it’s always nice to see filmmakers working against the grain rather than slavishly following the herd.