While Cannes will never be a horror festival, it’s been increasingly open to dipping a toe into the fantastique. It is, after all, the festival that championed Julia Ducournau’s Titane. In 2026, the Midnight section is having something of a golden year, and Schoenbrun opens Un Certain Regard rather than Midnight (a signal in itself), and the section brings Dupieux, Mandico, Yeon Sang-ho, two debut features, and the most cheerfully deranged animated film the festival has seen in years.
Meanwhile a strong current of doom runs through the rest of the schedule, including in the Competition proper. Zvyagintsev, Farhadi, Dhont, Mysius, Harari: all of them understand that dread is a formal problem as much as a narrative one.
There’s also the Japanese moment: Hamaguchi, Kore-eda, and Fukada all in Competition simultaneously for the first time in 25 years, each doing something formally interesting at the edges of genre. And presiding over all of it: Park Chan-wook as jury president.
Here’s what we’re most looking forward to.
Horror and genre films
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma — Jane Schoenbrun (UCR Opening Film)
A horror director tries to recast a franchise’s final girl.
Hannah Einbinder, Eva Victor, and Gillian Anderson star in what is shaping up as Schoenbrun’s most explictly genre-engaged film yet, and the trailer has an ominous Anderson announcing “there’s a hole in the bottom of the lake… that’s where the movies come from.” This is a filmmaker who has already produced two of the most formally precise horror films of recent years in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow. Both used genre to do something genuinely new with trans identity, psychic dissolution, and the particular horror of not knowing what you are. We’ve followed Schoenbrun from the start. The UCR opening slot is a significant step up in profile and exactly the kind of recognition the site has been arguing they deserve.
Her Private Hell — Nicolas Winding Refn (Out of Competition)
A strange mist engulfs a futuristic metropolis and unleashes an elusive leather-clad killer, while a young woman goes searching for her father through the fog.
Shot in Tokyo and Copenhagen, starring Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton alongside a large ensemble including Hidetoshi Nishijima, Aoi Yamada, and Diego Calva. Actresses gather at a posh hotel to shoot a Barbarella-like film while a killer known as Leather Man works his way through the city. Pino Donaggio — De Palma’s composer on Dressed to Kill, Carrie, Blow Out — scores it. Refn back at Cannes for the first time in a decade, promising glitter, sex, and violence. We love The Neon Demon, which was one of the most divisive films the festival produced that year; this looks like it intends to go even further.
Victorian Psycho — Zachary Wigon (UCR)
1858: an eccentric young governess arrives at a remote gothic manor, and staff begin to disappear.
Much-adored horror icon Maika Monroe leads, with Ruth Wilson, Thomasin McKenzie, and Jason Isaacs. This was adapted by Virginia Feito from her own novel, and produced by the Longlegs team. The period gothic horror with literary pedigree is a tradition we adore, and this has strong credentials on every level.
Roma Elastica — Bertrand Mandico (Midnight)
A washed-up movie star escapes her pain by taking the lead in a Roman sci-fi film — playing a mutant artist destined to die, killed by fanatics, in a vision of 2025 as imagined in the 1980s.
Marion Cotillard stars, with Noémie Merlant as her loyal makeup artist, and an ensemble including Franco Nero, Ornella Muti (not the bore worms!), and Isabella Ferrari that is itself a love letter to Italian cinema’s golden era, shot at Cinecittà. Mandico’s films — The Wild Boys, After Blue, Conann — are body horror and surrealist fantasy hybrids: lurid, tactile, and formally extreme.
Sanguine — Marion Le Corroller (Midnight, debut feature)
A medical intern begins noticing something deeply wrong with the patients she’s treating… and maybe with herself.
Mara Taquin and Karin Viard star in this medical mystery horror from a debut feature filmmaker whose short films have established a strong genre pedigree in France.
Colony / Gun-Che — Yeon Sang-ho (Midnight)
Professor Se-jeong is thrust into a bloody nightmare when a rapidly mutating virus is released during a biotech conference causing authorities to seal the facility. Trapped inside with no escape, Se-jeong along with a small group of survivors must fight to stay alive while the infected undergo horrific transformations.
The premise speaks for itself, and early word is that with this action horror Yeon Sang-ho has recaptured the electricity of Train to Busan. If so, this could be one of the horrors of the year.
Full Phil — Quentin Dupieux (Midnight)
American industrial magnate Philip Doom travels to Paris to reconnect with his estranged daughter — but French cuisine, a 1950s horror film, and an invasive hotel employee derail the trip in ways that escalate unpredictably.
Woody Harrelson and Kristen Stewart play father and daughter, with Emma Mackey, Charlotte Le Bon, and Tim and Eric rounding out the cast. Dupieux calls it “like Emily in Paris in hell — a fever dream, a nightmare version of it,” and says there’s a second film inside the film. Excitingly, this is his first English-language film in years. We called The Piano Accident the best Dupieux since Mandibles at Fantastic Fest last year; this looks like it might go further.
Jim Queen — Marco Nguyen & Nicolas Athané (Midnight, debut feature)
Jim, a gay Parisian influencer, contracts Heterosis — a virus that turns gay men straight — and teams up with his last remaining follower, a closeted admirer named Lucien, to find a rumoured cure in the Marais.
From Bobbypills studio, whose adult animated series have a cult following in France. The directors are animators by trade — Nguyen worked on The Summit of the Gods, Athané on The Red Turtle — and the co-writers say the film’s political edge got much more pointed as it developed over seven years.
Dread, the uncanny, and moral pressure
Hope — Na Hong-jin (Competition)
A tiger sighting near Korea’s DMZ sends a village police chief to investigate — and what he finds is something far stranger than any jungle cat.
Reports suggest the film escalates to extraterrestrial territory: Na, whose The Wailing moved from rural procedural to supernatural horror to cosmic mystery in one film, appears to be working in a similar genre-shifting register but on a vastly larger scale. Shot by Hong Kyung-pyo (Parasite, Burning, The Wailing), with one of the biggest budgets in Korean film history, and a mixed Korean-Hollywood cast including Hwang Jung-min, Hoyeon, Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Taylor Russell. Na’s first Competition slot and first film in a decade.
The Unknown / L’Inconnue — Arthur Harari (Competition)
A man wakes in the body of an unknown woman — Léa Seydoux in the lead — as a photographer’s fixation becomes an identity crisis.
Harari, fresh from co-writing Anatomy of a Fall, takes bodily horror and identity dissolution into an arthouse register. We can’t wait to see where this one goes.
Minotaur — Andrey Zvyagintsev (Competition)
A successful Russian businessman in 2022 discovers his wife is having an affair; his ordered life collapses toward violence as conscription tightens its grip.
Political fable, crime thriller, classical myth encoded in the title. Zvyagintsev’s films — Leviathan, Loveless, Elena — operate in the cold register of Greek tragedy applied to post-Soviet moral rot. His best work functions as horror by other means, and the timing — a Russian film set in 2022 — gives it an inherent urgency his recent work has lacked.
The Birthday Party / Histoires de la nuit — Léa Mysius (Competition)
On an isolated French farm, a family prepares a surprise birthday party. But when three mysterious men arrive at nightfall, buried secrets start to surface.
Adapted from Laurent Mauvignier’s novel, starring Hafsia Herzi, Monica Bellucci, Benoît Magimel, and Bastien Bouillon. What sounds like a rural home-invasion thriller has Mysius’ fingerprints all over it — The Five Devils was one of the most genuinely strange films we covered in its year, and she consistently finds the supernatural in the domestic. This is her Competition debut.
Everytime — Sandra Wollner (UCR)
A year after Jessie’s death, her mother and younger sister take in her ex-boyfriend — the boy the whole world quietly blames — and the three of them travel to Tenerife for the family holiday that never happened.
Stars Birgit Minichmayr, shot by Aftersun cinematographer Gregory Oke. Wollner’s The Trouble with Being Born — domestic android programmed with a dead girl’s memories — was one of the most formally and morally confrontational films of its year, and that film’s preoccupation with grief, substitution, and the uncanny persistence of the dead continues here in a more naturalistic register.
Sheep in the Box — Hirokazu Kore-eda (Competition)
In the near future, grieving parents bring a humanoid robot into their home in place of their dead son.
Kore-eda has spent his career studying the gap between legal and emotional kinship — Nobody Knows, Shoplifters, Broker. Moving that sensibility into AI grief is a surprising but logical development, and the quietly uncanny register it implies has us hooked. Part of the historic Japanese Competition trifecta.
The End of It — Maria Martínez Bayona (Cannes Première, debut feature)
In a near-future world where ageing can be cured and death is optional, a 250-year-old artist decides she’s had enough — and her decision unsettles everyone around her.
Rebecca Hall leads, with Noomi Rapace and Gael García Bernal. BBC Film and BFI backed, directed by a London-based NFTS graduate whose shorts played Fantastic Fest and LFF. This darkly comic sci-fi about mortality and artistic reclamation might be the most significant British genre debut at the festival.
Asian cinema highlights
Kokurojo / The Samurai and the Prisoner — Kurosawa Kiyoshi (Cannes Première)
A 16th century warlord, besieged in his own castle after rebelling against Nobunaga Oda, finds a murderer loose among his retainers — and must form an uneasy alliance with the brilliant strategist he’s keeping prisoner in the dungeon.
A feudal locked-room mystery, adapted from Honobu Yonezawa’s award-winning novel, pairing Masahiro Motoki and Masaki Suda. Kiyoshi’s first period film and by all accounts one of his his most ambitious features — a director who built his reputation on locating horror in formal restraint and everyday textures, taking on the grandest and most tradition-bound of Japanese genres. Of his recent films, we particularly loved Chime at the Berlinale in 2024, and Cloud at Venice in 2025.
Nagi Notes — Kōji Fukada (Competition)
A sculptor in rural Okayama, living in the shadow of a past love, finds her quiet life disrupted when a friend arrives from Tokyo to model for her work.
Adapted from Oriza Hirata’s celebrated play Tokyo Notes, nine years in the making, starring Takako Matsu and Shizuka Ishibashi. Fukada’s Harmonium — slow-burn domestic horror in a composed-surface mode — is one of the most-referenced Japanese films on this site, and the register here seems similar: lives disrupted by the return of something that should have stayed away. Second of the Japanese Competition trifecta.
All of a Sudden / Soudain — Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Competition)
Virginie Efira runs a nursing home beset with staff shortages; Tao Okamoto plays a stage director with terminal cancer — and across 196 minutes, the boundaries between them begin to dissolve.
Hamaguchi’s first film outside Japan, in French. His method — conversation as emotional excavation, the ordinary rendered quietly uncanny — fills the gap between what people say and what they mean feel with a kind of latent dread. Third of the Japanese Competition trifecta.
All the Lovers in the Night — Sode Yukiko (Cannes Première)
A solitary freelance proofreader whose days follow a precise, self-contained rhythm meets a reserved physics teacher — and her structured life slowly shifts.
Shot on 16mm, starring Minato Sawai and Tadanobu Asano. The first screen adaptation of Mieko Kawakami’s work, whose writing has one of the most devoted international readerships of any living Japanese author. Sode’s Aristocrats was precisely observed and emotionally restrained – we’re hoping for more of the sand here.
Other Competition standouts
Parallel Tales / Histoires Parallèles — Asghar Farhadi (Competition)
A novelist spies on her neighbours for inspiration, and what she finds sets off a chain of moral consequences that none of them can escape cleanly.
Huppert, Deneuve, Efira, Cassel, and Niney. Farhadi’s second French-language film and his fifth time in Competition. The way Farhadi draws out ordinary situations from which there is no clean exit, with dread accumulating procedurally, always sucks us in. That cast in his hands is one of the most genuinely exciting propositions in the lineup.
Coward — Lukas Dhont (Competition)
1916: Pierre, a young Belgian soldier desperate to prove himself at the front, meets the flamboyant Francis behind the lines — and together, to counter war rhetoric and everyday misery, they persuade their comrades to stage a theatrical revue.
Shot on the actual battlefields near Ypres. Dhont calls it “a film about love and death, creation and destruction” and a tribute to those who tried to escape war at any cost. Girl understood bodies under social pressure; Close understood how damage transmits between people through proximity; this feels like a natural continuation — the same preoccupation with tenderness between men, and with what it costs, pushed into the most extreme possible setting. Rumoured to be his l most ambitious film yet, this was submitted past the Cannes deadline and accepted anyway.
Fatherland — Pawel Pawlikowski (Competition)
Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika — played by Sandra Hüller, actress, journalist, rally driver, anti-fascist — take a road trip through a Germany in ruins.
Pawlikowski’s compressed formalism, applied to the wreckage of European cultural history and the particular bond between a father and a daughter who was in many ways more courageous than he was. August Diehl plays Mann. Eight years since the gorgeous Cold War (our favourite film of that year) this feels like the film he’s been building toward.
Fjord — Cristian Mungiu (Competition)
A devout Romanian-Norwegian couple — Mihai (Sebastian Stan) and Lisbet (Renate Reinsve) — move with their five children to Lisbet’s remote coastal village in Norway, where they quickly befriend their neighbours the Halbergs. Then their eldest daughter Elia arrives at school with bruising on her body, and the community starts to wonder whether the family’s strict traditional upbringing is to blame.
Based on real cases, including a Norwegian child welfare scandal from 2015, and set against a country that has been repeatedly found in breach by the European Court of Human Rights for removing children from immigrant families. Mungiu’s method — the slow accumulation of institutional and communal pressure until a situation becomes irreversible — finds its perfect subject here: a family caught between two cultures, two ideas of discipline and freedom, and a welfare system with the power to take everything. His 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days remains one of the great European films of its era, and he’ll always fund us coming back for more
Cannes 2026 runs 13–24 May.
Whitlock&Pope 