Red Rocks (2026) ‘Cannes’ Movie Review: Bruno Dumont Finds Awe, Danger, and First Love in Childhood Wanderings

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Red Rocks (Les roches rouges, 2026) is a classic love story, only measured in hugs rather than soliloquies or kisses. It is a film that deals bluntly and effectively in the language of scale – ancient huge rock faces against children’s bodies, immense vistas against their instinctive faces, so close to the wide lens they are almost touching us. Often they are cheekily looking back at us. Our interpretation of them is their game, they seem to say.

Set on the sunburned Mediterranean coast, where the titular red cliffs tower over the landscape and a local train whizzes hourly across a bridge towards nearby Italy, we meet our hero. Tiny in the frame, sneezing into the sun and observing the street with childlike indifference, is Géo, played by professional child and non-professional actor Kaylon Lancel. He is a roughly five-year-old boy who spends his days stealing from unattended cars with his mates and angering the rival cliff-jumper squad over his growing interest in their equally young femme fatale, Eve (Kelsie Verdeilles).

These competing child gangs are very much from different economic backgrounds, and the mystery of their offscreen parents is a clever conceit. Pointedly, we only meet some of Eve’s rich family once, in an enormous villa overlooking the sea, and little Géo’s parents we never meet at all. As their child-love story, maybe even friendship story, progresses in silent hair touching, grinning, bike riding and swimming-pool lounging, we aggregate in detail their summer with each other, headed, of course, for a (muted) trauma. There is a distinct sense of those who live here all the time versus those who are holidaying here; just passing through on their summer jaunts.

What is most successful is the film’s loose ability to let the children speak, often wordlessly, for themselves. “Red Rocks” is a cascading buildup of incident, of random hangouts, cliff jumping and of an unsupervised journey by train across the border to meet Eve’s grandparents. Somewhere, this design is a little underdeveloped and overwrought simultaneously, with a mildly repetitive quality that feels unintentional. But the level of incident and its startling naturalness is constantly intriguing. Take, for instance, Géo falling off his bike as he’s trying to show off to Eve, or sneezing unintentionally midway through a game of flirtation, followed immediately by a guilty look to the camera.

It is these looks that, through Carlos Alfonso Corral’s generous cinematography, are the film’s greatest asset. Whenever a child looks directly at us it feels incidental, a tail-end piece of footage in a less intelligent filmmaker’s hands, giving us instead unprecedented access, a sense of being enveloped in a reality that is always slipping at the edges of the frame. There is something wonderful in the embodying of a classical story in these low-key documentary dimensions. Dumont’s usual nastiness is also notably absent here. The brutality of “Twentynine Palms” (2003) or “L’humanité” (1999) is replaced by an unselfconscious interest.

As the film seems to deal in tautologies, there is something simultaneously involved and ironised, as in his classic TV show “P’tit Quinquin,” encouraging a Brechtian distancing but also total immersion in this bizarre worldscape. There is a terrifying softness to these children’s bodies against the looming red rock landscape. In Géo’s first moment of risk, where out of pride he convinces himself to clamber higher and higher, Eve touches her hair in worry.

This natural little movement brings back sudden strong sensations of the life-or-death nature of growing up. When the children scramble up the rock face, we sense the pressure to perform almost like a physical force. But then we are reminded that these children are locked within a loose dramatic structure that feels increasingly inevitable and unnecessary as the film progresses.

Dumont’s usual digressions are both the film’s strength and its slight weakness. There is a great sustained scene when, visiting Eve’s Ventimiglian family, her grandfather plays tennis as dogs run around the court, snatching at balls. Dumont is more interested in the dogs and the balls than any other aspect of the scene, creating sequences that manage to feel spontaneous and designed simultaneously. Elsewhere, the film’s cliff-jumping theme feels like it could have been stretched further, and in the end, we are left with something fairly lightweight in Dumont’s heavyweight back catalogue.

But there is so much here to love. His endless twisting of his ideas into new shapes (his last film, “The Empire,” was a “Star Wars” riff), the ballsiness of children’s hugs played with total solemnity as units of storytelling, both prove and stretch the edges of his work’s possibilities. Eve and Géo themselves are enchanting, bringing a striking selflessness to their roles, where their role-play with each other is a constant rearranging and softening in their relationship. They are, along with everyone else, brilliantly cast. Ultimately, “Red Rocks” feels both like a love letter to, and a showcase of, the possibilities of stories led entirely by children’s exploration.