‘Red Rocks’ review: Bruno Dumont assembles a charming young cast for his beguiling childhood fantasy

Dir/scr: Bruno Dumont. Portugal/ France/Italy/Spain/Qatar 2026.  90mins.

You never know quite what to expect with French writer-director Bruno Dumont. For years, he explored the severe, even forbidding mode that he established in 1997 debut The Life of Jesus, but showed a talent for gonzo comedy in 2014 TV series Li’l Quinquin. He has also taken some eccentric left turns, as in 2024’s screw-loose sci-fi parody The Empire. Yet all are linked by the same spareness of style and intransigent defiance of viewer expectation. Red Rocks is another departure. With a cast almost entirely composed of children, it is slender by Dumont’s standards but hugely distinctive, depicting childhood as effectively resembling life on another planet.

A significant contribution to the tradition of French films about children

At once charming and disconcerting, Red Rocks is Dumont’s most accessible film in ages, and likely to export healthily following its debut in Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.

The setting is a stretch of rocky Mediterranean coastline, and the central character is Géo (Kaylon Lancel), a wiry tyke roughly five years old. By virtue of cheeky charisma and lawless daring, he’s essentially the ringleader of his little gang, which also comprises slightly older kids Manon (Louise Podolski) and Rouben (Mohamed Coly). They spend their summer hanging around at the foot of a viaduct, racing about on quad bikes and doing a little sly thieving. Above all, they clamber like sure-footed goats on the towering red promontories that are a striking, almost extraterrestrial-looking feature of this region, braving their heights to jump into the sea below.

One day, they meet another rock-scaling trio, headed by B. (Alessandro Piquera), whose young sidekick Ève (Kelsie Verdeilles) instantly connects with scrawny mischief-maker Géo. The affection is mutual, sparking tension – a jealous B. shooting Géo some full-force scowls, while Manon looks warily on. Meanwhile, the friends visit the gardens of the fancy villa where Ève lives, while she and Géo take a train journey across the Italian border to see her grandfather, who’s more interested in his tennis lesson than in their visit.

By and large, however, there is very little adult presence; certainly no-one policing the children’s edenic existence. The only exceptions are the boatload of gendarmerie who warn them off the rocks – and they’re given mocking short shrift. There’s also the man trying to make a phone call while Géo distracts him with a display of full-tilt tomfoolery. There is clearly a high level of fantasy in the idea of two very young children simply taking a train ride across the Italian border and back – but Dumont beautifully primes us for the irrealism of this premise with an extended scene in which Géo and Eve simply sit on the railway platform chatting, in their oddly disconnected, repetitive way.

Always seen wandering around in swimming trunks and a skimpy vest, with no visible home or family, Géo is less like a real child, more – as his name suggests – a sort of earth spirit, subject to no laws but his own elemental will. He’s certainly extraordinary (as are the other kids) in his daredevil climbing and sea-jumping. The effect is vertiginous and not a little nerve-racking, and the cast appear to be doing it all for real; up to the point at which Géo’s prowess is manifestly enhanced by visual effects that make it that touch more head-spinning, even transcendental. 

Dumont has long worked with teenagers and children, notably in L’il Quinquin but, as Géo, Kaylon Lancel is one of a kind. He has a constantly alert, galvanic nerviness expressed in non-stop physical movement and quizzical look. He is joined by an equally affecting but considerably less eccentric young ensemble, headed by the more conventionally charming Verdeilles, who has a very endearing lisp in her French pronunciation and who constantly smiles as if absolutely enthralled to be in the film.

Red Rocks is a significant contribution to the tradition of French films about children (Truffaut’s Pocket Money, Jacques Doillon’s Ponette, et al). There are occasional hints of coyness – Géo and his female buddies constantly hug each other heartily, albeit with hints of awkwardness. But the film’s hermetically enclosed pre-teen universe contains elements of danger, even violence, alongside the sweetness and hell-for-leather playfulness. 

Meanwhile, those intensely red rocks bring the film’s world a borderline-surreal, even quasi-Martian, flavour. DoP Carlos Alfonso Corral’s use of wide angle lenses – often trained on sweeping vistas of coastline – gives the children’s seemingly small milieu a vast quaility. Red Rocks depicts a small world, but one that Dumont makes very big, and wonderfully strange.