Nino: a young man’s world is rocked by a cancer diagnosis in a poignant French New Wave-inspired drama

A powerfully restrained performance by the Canadian actor Théodore Pellerin lies at the core of Pauline Loquès’s Nino, for which Pellerin won both the Cannes Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award and the ‘Best Male Revelation’ prize at the Césars in 2025. Doe-eyed and rangy, with an aquiline nose and a swooping gait (one of Nino’s friends fondly refers to him as an eagle), Pellerin embodies a certain type of Francophone actor: Grégoire Colin, Louis Garrel, Pierre Niney. He has an unusual reserve, though, bordering on passivity. There’s something of Buster Keaton in his slow-blinking bemusement at the events occurring around him. He is speechless for most of the film, and for good reason.

Nino begins where Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) ended, with a cancer diagnosis and the prospect of an unpleasant, but lifesaving, course of chemotherapy. On his 29th birthday, a Friday, Nino arrives at a clearly under-resourced hospital: flappy plastic sheeting lining the corridors, standing room only in the waiting rooms. Here, in the breaks between the sound of hammering from the building work outside her office, a harassed doctor delivers the bombshell, then briskly announces that Nino will begin treatment on Monday. Almost as an afterthought, she packs him off to produce a sperm specimen, since his treatment plan is likely to leave him infertile (he’ll have to do this elsewhere, mind you, since there’s no available room on site).

Nino reels home, only to discover he’s lost his keys. The film follows him over the next two days as he spends the weekend visiting family and friends, lurching from one to the next with no apparent plan, stumbling over the words to share his shocking news. Loquès elegantly evokes that dazed, underwater feeling of watching the world turn as usual while knowing that one’s relationship to it is utterly changed. Nino’s mother (Jeanne Balibar, charmingly chaotic) witters about canapés and interrupts his attempts at disclosure by asking if he’s transitioning: one of several laugh-out-loud moments that provide some bittersweet levity. At a party thrown by best friend Sofiane (William Lebghil), winsome influencers bleat about horoscopes while would-be tech bros bore on about therapy. All the while we are watching Nino, scanning his face for a flickering glimpse into what he is thinking, wondering how he can bear all this narcissistic navel-gazing while knowing what he does.

While Nino stays silent, he has Schrödinger’s cancer: at once dying and not dying. But Monday looms, and Nino’s ambivalence to the passing of time tells in the film’s editing. Whole days spent walking the Paris streets are elided into a handful of shots, while nights pass slowly, the action taking place almost entirely between dusk and dawn. In the dim-lit interiors of Nino’s friends and acquaintances’ homes, tender moments stretch out and settle in: Nino assisting Sofiane’s sister Lina with her fertility injections in the sanctuary of a locked bathroom. Lying in bed with his widowed mum, mother and son uncannily alike with their close dark crops and sharply hewn profiles. Whispering a confidence into the ear of a small boy (the son of Nino’s former schoolmate Zoé, played by Salomé Dewaels), who bursts into unaffected giggles. And in the early hours of Sunday morning, a chance encounter in a public bathhouse with a paternal figure (an impish Mathieu Amalric), who offers Nino tips on shaving and gently pats cologne onto his cheeks.

Throughout, the question of fatherhood quietly propels the film, in the low-thrumming urgency of Nino’s deadline and his own quiet preoccupations. Nino lies to Zoé that he is about to become a father and rings his mother at three in the morning to ask for details about his own dad, who died while Nino was still a boy and appears here only as a laughing face on a screen-printed pillow Nino receives as a birthday gift. As Zoé remembers the profound impression that young Nino’s stoicism made on her, the suspicion sneaks in that perhaps Nino’s refusal to look at death started a long time before his 29th birthday.

Fatherless child and prospective parent coalesce in the image of the gangly Pellerin standing before a mirror in his childhood home, trying on a tatty orange hoodie that one imagines he wore as a teen. His wrists protrude from the sleeves, his midriff is exposed. He seems not to recognise the self in the mirror, as if he had suddenly woken up an adult. Like the film itself, and its compelling central performance, it is prosaic, moving, and just a little bit funny.

► Nino In UK cinemas from 19 June.