‘Out Of Love’ review: Camille Cottin stars as a French woman flung into motherhood

Dir/scr: Nathan Ambrosioni. France. 2025. 111mins

Workaholic insurance assessor Jeanne (Camille Cottin) has no interest in being a parent; her marriage broke down because of her resistance to the idea. Then circumstances force her hand. Her younger, widowed sister Suzanne (Juliette Armanet) descends for a surprise visit to Jeanne’s neat home in a quiet French town then just as suddenly vanishes, leaving her two anxious young children in Jeanne’s care. All attempts to track her down fail, and Jeanne must admit the possibility that Suzanne is not coming back. The third film from Nathan Ambrosioni is unshowy but empathetic, a sensitively acted study of a woman struggling in a role she never anticipated playing.

The camerawork is in tune with the delicate nuances of the performances

The film, which premieres in the main Crystal Globe competition at Karlovy Vary, reunites Ambrosioni (2018’s Paper Flags) with the always impressive Cottin, who was the star of his previous film Toni (2023), about a single mother of five near-adult children. Slated for release in France in December, where it will carry the punchier title Les Enfants Sont Bien (The Children Are Fine), Out Of Love is a solid and thoughtful addition to the unwilling substitute parent sub-genre, which also includes Goran Stolevski’s 2023 title Housekeeping For Beginners.

Shot by Victor Seguin, who also lensed Eric Gravel’s propulsive mother-on-the-edge drama Full Time and Georgia Oakley’s Blue Jean, the film is eloquently framed and the camerawork is in tune with the delicate nuances of the performances. This is evident from the outset, before Suzanne and her kids have even arrived at Jeanne’s home. The family’s cramped car is parked by a provincial petrol station. Instructed to wait inside the vehicle, nine-year-old Gaspard (Manoa Varvat) and six-year-old Margaux (Nina Birman) are restless. Their mother has been gone far longer than necessary to buy supplies from the shop. Finally, they can stand it no longer and climb out of the car, tiny and lost in a wide shot that emphasises their terrifying vulnerability as cars and lorries scream past. They find Suzanne a few seconds later but it is a gut punch of a moment that seeds the disquieting idea something very bad is about to happen.

As the older of the two, Gaspard is more attuned to the charged undercurrents in the brittle volley of questions that passes for a conversation between his mother and her sister. Taken off-guard by Suzanne’s surprise visit, Jeanne cannot quite bring herself to feign an enthusiastic welcome. Acting newcomer Varvat has a gift for the kind of wary, watchfully reactive performance that adds an extra layer to the drama unfolding between the sisters.

What is missing from the film is much sense of Suzanne as a person. She is a fleeting physical presence, and most of what is learned about her comes second hand, from her children’s memories and from the cry for help that is her squalid, messy apartment. But while you rather wish we knew more about her and what drives her to vanish, the film’s approach makes sense given it is told predominantly from Jeanne’s point of view. And one of the many aspects of the new situation that she must come to terms with is admitting how little she knew her own sister.

This sense of mystery persists to the end, with Suzanne’s fate still uncertain. Ambrosioni closes the film with much of the story left to discover. Some of it, we suspect, will be painful for all concerned. But at least Jeanne and the two children are no longer an unfolding crisis and are starting to look like a family.