At the French Film Film Festival - Tom Ryan reviews the 'Quietly compelling, exquisitely gentle, ...perfectly judged' - OUT OF LOVE (Nathan Ambrosioni, 2025)

Unexpected events can change people’s lives. For Jeanne (Camille Cottin) in Nathan Ambrosioni’s superb Out of Love – the original title, Les enfants vont bien literally translates as “The Children are Alright” – it’s the arrival on her suburban Paris doorstep of her sister Suzanne (Juliette Armanet) with her nine-year-old son, Gaspard (Manoã Varvat), and his little sister, Margaux (Nina Birman). 

Anybody who’s ever found themselves fortunate enough to take on parenting obligations will recognise Jeanne’s sense of panic when Suzanne disappears overnight, leaving her children behind. Jeanne is single and child-free by choice. Both sisters’ lives have been scarred by loss and each is, in her own way, still grieving about it. 

Beautifully shot by Victor Sequin and tenderly enfolded by Alexandre de La Baume’s unobtrusive score, the 26-year-old Ambrosioni’s emotionally potent family drama transforms Jeanne’s uneasy attempts to adjust to the changes thrust upon her into a journey of self-discovery. At the same time, it empathetically evokes the children’s confusion at what’s happened to them and the frightening fear of forever-abandonment that has fuelled so many fairytales over the years and has now found them cast adrift in the world. 

For Jeanne, the crisis becomes both personal and professional. Nicole (Monia Chokri), her former partner, shows her by example that it’s possible to deal with the needs of the children she’s been forced to take under her wing. And so, juggling her work as an insurance claims assessor with the demands of mothering these two lost souls, as well as with trying to make sense of her sister’s disappearance, Jeanne gradually comes to recognise parts of herself that she never knew were there.

Out of Love’s visual style tells us about the sisters’ lives even before we’re properly introduced to either of them. The restlessness of the opening scenes – as Suzanne drives the children to Jeanne’s – is in sharp contrast to the orderliness that characterises the initial sequences in Jeanne’s home. But then, as Jeanne comes face-to-face with her unexpected event, the stillness with which she had surrounded herself is not only disrupted but comes to seem like it’s been a prison all along. Nothing in the film is simple, every scene charged with a sense that things could change again in an instant. 

Ambrosioni’s approach throughout is measured and compassionate, rigorously drained of melodrama and neatly balancing Jeanne’s needs against the children’s confusion and distress. And the film’s glorious final sequence offers no easy solutions for any of the characters, setting imagery evoking lost childhoods against Gaspard and Margaux’s essential decency and resilience and guiding us towards an appreciation of how Jeanne’s commitments speak of a well-earned sense of renewal.

Quietly compelling, exquisitely gentle, delicately nuanced and graced by superb performances all round, this is a perfectly judged film.