Real Faces (2025) 'SXSW' Movie Review: Stumbling Upon Something Real In A Bustling Metropolis

Real Faces (2025) ‘SXSW’ Movie Review —

“I stand in the window and watch the moon.

She is thin and lustreless,

But I love her.

I know the moon,

And this is an alien city.”

These words from Amy Lowell’s “A London Thoroughfare. 2 A.M.” mesh well into the DNA of “Real Faces” (2025), Leni Huyghe’s tender, ruminative drama about urban isolation. The city in question here is Brussels, where casting director Julia (Leonie Buysse) has recently moved in an effort to start anew. We are not privy to what exactly prompted this move, as Julia guards her true emotions instinctively and wears an amiable mask while navigating social situations. She seems content but unwittingly seeks human connection while lost in the sea of faces.

While apartment hunting in the city, Julia crosses paths with Eliott (Gorges Ocloo), a microbiologist who mostly keeps to himself and his cat, Wasabi. As the two share a beautiful apartment, Julia and Eliott organically form a friendship, which evolves into a more symbiotic relationship between two souls. Just like Eliott’s varied, vibrant lichen grows and seeps into their surroundings, so does this friendship, which fundamentally changes Julia. After all, Eliott is like the comforting moon for Julia in an unfamiliar urban landscape designed to discourage people from lingering.

Julia’s sense of identity seems firmly tied to her work, which she understandably takes pride in. When washed-up director David Genau (Yoann Blanc) hires her for his “Orpheus and Eurydice”-inspired perfume ad, Julia picks out promising candidates from the bustling streets for the audition process. However, David is one of those creatives who overestimate their genius and attribute their inconsistent vision to someone else’s incompetence. “I want to dig deeper than a face, a name, a profession,” he states while detailing his vision for the ad, but what does that even mean?

David’s unreasonable demands from Julia filter into her audition process, as she is unable to push back and draw strong professional boundaries. Glimmers of her true self spill over in unspoken moments, such as when she diverges from David’s bizarre audition questionnaire or connects with someone without pretense.

Real Faces (2025) — A still from “Real Faces” (2025)

Amid these moments of intense internal turmoil, Eliott emerges as a soothing balm. A particular segment in the film brings Julia and Eliott together in a sweet, organic moment of friendship, where the two drink wine and rehearse David’s lines from the perfume ad. There’s sincerity and humor embedded in these moments, a rare spark of authenticity between two people who happened to meet in a city that comes alive at night. Director of Photography Grimm Vandekerckhove captures these genuine, elusive moments in a way that frames these characters with startling complexity while also lingering on grainy cityscapes and beautiful lichen staking claim over these urban spaces.

Eliott feels grounded amid the everyday hum-drum of the city, pouring his passion into his work without compromise or self-deceit. Julia, on the other hand, is the embodiment of conflict: she’s rather ambiguous about things that happen to her, choosing conformity when she has a chance to rebel or walk away. At the same time, she resists and does things on her own terms, gradually expanding her perceptions about life after encountering Eliott. She might feel like a mystery, and is anything but: Julia is flesh and blood, a woman who escapes her pain by throwing herself into work, which demands certain idealizations. These inconsistencies are integral to her constantly evolving identity, and she must identify her lapses in the face of something real. And in the end, she does.

Both Buysse and Ocloo effortlessly slip into their respective roles, saying a lot about their inner landscapes without verbalizing. There’s a free-flowing element to their chemistry that feels electric, in the same way as when you randomly sit next to a stranger who ends up understanding you on a visceral level. There are no grand declarations here, no dramatic promises about friendship, but a quiet pact of mutual adoration that spills over into every shared memory. Eliott’s lichen collection is not merely a token of his passion for these hybrid lifeforms but proof that a bond between Julia and Eliott existed at some point. Even if the two never speak again, the lichen will outlive this fleeting but meaningful connection, serving as a reminder that life can truly be strange and beautiful.