Pauline Loques’ Nino unfolds in a compressed timeframe, yet feels expansive in the weight and emotions it carries. The film follows a young man whose life is suddenly redirected by a serious medical diagnosis, HPV-related cancer, depicting it through an educational, emotional, yet unsentimental angle. Loques keeps the camera close to her character, allowing us to read subtle shifts in performance. The pace is quick in terms of events, but the emotional register is slow and deliberate, leaving space for the audience to absorb the weight of the narrative.
Directed by: Pauline Loques
Year: 2025
Country: France
Length: 97 minutes
Théodore Pellerin gives a performance that draws attention to the smallest expressions. His eyes communicate more than his words, and they seem to carry a constant melancholy even when he smiles. Early in the film, Nino collects and freezes his sperm. Shortly after, he runs into Zoé, an old classmate. He tells her that he is going to be a father too, though the truth is more complicated. This encounter is played with a mix of tenderness and awkwardness. Loques allows the audience to see how Nino’s sudden proximity to illness changes the way he speaks about the future, as if naming it aloud will keep it from disappearing.
The film drifts between public and private spaces, tracing Nino’s movement through the city. Loques captures ordinary locations with an atmosphere that makes them feel charged. Conversations arrive with sudden intimacy, then retreat again into guardedness. The people Nino meets seem to mirror his own shifting sense of self: old acquaintances, close friends, family members.
What stands out most is the way Loques treats the subject of illness without leaning into the language of tragedy. There are moments of awkward humour, of warmth, even of playfulness, but they do not cancel the tension running beneath. Instead, they exist alongside it, the way fleeting pleasures continue to appear in real life, even when something scary and seemingly irreversible has begun. The conversations between Nino and his loved ones reflect the struggles of those who have and will find themselves a victim of this disease that remains taboo.
Nino’s relationship with his mother is drawn with particular care. Their scenes together are layered with misunderstanding, affection, and the avoidance of certain words. Loques allows silences to sit. These gaps in communication are as revealing as anything said aloud.
Nino invites the viewer into a moment of life when the future has been abruptly reshaped, educating them about an underdiscussed yet important subject. Loques shows how that tension can make the smallest gestures, be it a glance, a question, a touch, feel charged with significance. It is a film that confronts the audience with a harsh and real theme, only to affirm, through representation and understanding, that there is hope.
Nino premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival as part of the International Critics’ Week section.
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