‘No One Will Know’ review: A Parisian bar plays host to a looping crime thriller

Dir: Vincent Maël Cardona. France. 2025. 115mins

As daybreak breaks, a combination of regulars and strangers wash up in a down-at-heel bar known as Le Roi Soleil on the outskirts of Paris; the top of an extended evening for some, the start of a brand new day for others. All feels regular – till one of many regulars, a mild-mannered old-timer named Monsieur Kantz (Claude Aufaure) wins a €294 million lottery jackpot. A gun is pulled, photographs are fired. And the successful ticket is left with out an proprietor. The remaining clients spot a possibility, and try and concoct a canopy story with a view to share the prize between them. However as this slippery, looping thriller makes clear – repeatedly – nothing is ever easy.

The screenplay might do with being lots lighter on its ft

That is the second function from Breton-born director Vincent Maël Cardona; his first was Magnetic Beats (2021), which vividly captured a time, place and cultural second within the pirate radio scene of Brittany of the Eighties and went on to win a Cesar after premiering in Cannes Administrators’ Fortnight. A contrived style image which bows in a Midnight slot in Cannes, No One Will Know is a much less clearly private work for the director. The playfully serpentine construction – the story repeatedly rewinds, replaying from a unique perspective to include the most recent lies devised by the money-hungry punters – is partaking up to some extent. However that is the sort of rattling high-concept thriller that succeeds or fails on the power and conviction of the storytelling, each of that are depleted lengthy earlier than the movie hauls itself to its bloody conclusion.

Though it takes place virtually fully within the unprepossessing bar, the movie is bookended by two scenes set on the Palace of Versailles. The primary, set earlier within the night earlier than the occasions detailed within the movie, follows Erwan (Joseph Oliveness), a coked-up financier at a gala social gathering who barges into the King’s bedchamber, with a shell-shocked intern (Sylvain Baumann) in tow. He’s delivering a lecture on his ladder concept of social standing, whereas concurrently trying to seduce the hapless intern. Then the safety employees meet up with him and he’s compelled to flee, jubilant and trouserless, into the evening.

By the point we subsequent encounter Erwan, the medicine have worn off and the regrets have kicked in as he huddles in a nook of the bar. It’s an elaborate introduction to a personality who seems to be a minor participant within the unfolding story. And this, along with a coda which revisits Versailles, this time in the course of the reign of Louis XIV, is without doubt one of the extra unwieldy parts of the screenplay that would do with being lots lighter on its ft.

The closest factor now we have to central characters on this ensemble is a pair of cops, Livio (Pio Marmai) and Reda (Sofiane Zermani). Regulars on the bar, they’re winding down after a tense shift. Livio, a worrier by nature, is fretting over the truth that he discharged his firearm earlier within the night to disperse a crowd; he’s additionally preoccupied with a latest one evening stand with the bar’s waitress, Esme (Lucie Zhang), a philosophy pupil working off the books to fund her research. Nico (Xianzeng Pan) is her employer and the proprietor of Le Roi Soleil; Abel (Panayotis Pascot) is a paramedic who’s reeling from a trauma throughout his evening at work. The arrival of an agitated stranger (Némo Schiffman) units the nerves of the regulars on edge.

Tensions explode as soon as the extent of the lottery win turns into clear, and the rising grasping desperation is matched by the physique rely. The karaoke machine is cranked into life, and the cheesy gentle present offers the movie a grotesque high quality. There’s a purgatorial facet to the bar, a way that when you might be there, and have purchased into the ill-gotten scheme, there isn’t any escape. One character, who has been locked in a room within the cellar, crawls by means of a air flow shaft solely to find that it leads straight again to the room subsequent to his. And because the story loops again on itself but once more, we begin to share his frustrations.