‘No One Will Know’ review: A Parisian bar plays host to a looping crime thriller

Dir: Vincent Maël Cardona. France. 2025. 115mins

As dawn breaks, a mixture of regulars and strangers wash up in a down-at-heel bar called Le Roi Soleil on the outskirts of Paris; the end of a long night for some, the beginning of a new day for others. All feels normal – until one of the regulars, a mild-mannered old-timer named Monsieur Kantz (Claude Aufaure) wins a €294 million lottery jackpot. A gun is pulled, shots are fired. And the winning ticket is left without an owner. The remaining customers spot an opportunity, and attempt to concoct a cover story in order to share the prize between them. But as this slippery, looping thriller makes clear – repeatedly – nothing is ever simple.

The screenplay could do with being a lot lighter on its feet

This is the second feature from Breton-born director Vincent Maël Cardona; his first was Magnetic Beats (2021), which vividly captured a time, place and cultural moment in the pirate radio scene of Brittany of the 1980s and went on to win a Cesar after premiering in Cannes Directors’ Fortnight. A contrived genre picture which bows in a Midnight slot in Cannes, No One Will Know is a less obviously personal work for the director. The playfully serpentine structure – the story repeatedly rewinds, replaying from a different perspective to incorporate the latest lies devised by the money-hungry punters – is engaging up to a point. But this is the kind of rattling high-concept thriller that succeeds or fails on the energy and conviction of the storytelling, both of which are depleted long before the film hauls itself to its bloody conclusion.

Although it takes place almost entirely in the unprepossessing bar, the film is bookended by two scenes set at the Palace of Versailles. The first, set earlier in the evening before the events detailed in the film, follows Erwan (Joseph Oliveness), a coked-up financier at a gala party who barges into the King’s bedchamber, with a shell-shocked intern (Sylvain Baumann) in tow. He’s delivering a lecture on his ladder theory of social status, while simultaneously attempting to seduce the hapless intern. Then the security staff catch up with him and he is forced to flee, jubilant and trouserless, into the night.

By the time we next encounter Erwan, the drugs have worn off and the regrets have kicked in as he huddles in a corner of the bar. It’s an elaborate introduction to a character who turns out to be a minor player in the unfolding story. And this, together with a coda which revisits Versailles, this time during the reign of Louis XIV, is one of the more unwieldy elements of the screenplay that could do with being a lot lighter on its feet.

The closest thing we have to central characters in this ensemble is a pair of cops, Livio (Pio Marmai) and Reda (Sofiane Zermani). Regulars at the bar, they are winding down after a stressful shift. Livio, a worrier by nature, is fretting over the fact that he discharged his firearm earlier in the evening to disperse a crowd; he’s also preoccupied with a recent one night stand with the bar’s waitress, Esme (Lucie Zhang), a philosophy student working off the books to fund her studies. Nico (Xianzeng Pan) is her employer and the proprietor of Le Roi Soleil; Abel (Panayotis Pascot) is a paramedic who is reeling from a trauma during his night at work. The arrival of an agitated stranger (Némo Schiffman) sets the nerves of the regulars on edge.

Tensions explode once the extent of the lottery win becomes clear, and the growing greedy desperation is matched by the body count. The karaoke machine is cranked into life, and the tacky light show gives the film a grotesque quality. There’s a purgatorial aspect to the bar, a sense that once you are there, and have bought into the ill-gotten scheme, there is no escape. One character, who has been locked in a room in the cellar, crawls through a ventilation shaft only to discover that it leads straight back to the room next to his. And as the story loops back on itself yet again, we start to share his frustrations.