Cannes 2025 Review: NO ONE WILL KNOW Contemplates Just How Far People May Go to Make a Killing
The opening scene of No One Will Know, Vincent Maël Cardona's out-of-competition midnight title at the Cannes Film Festival, does little to prepare the audience for what ultimately transpires as an endlessly grim and bloody thriller about the bottomless pit of unbridled greed.
Two men are in the men's room at the royal palace, for a black-tie soirée where monotonous music drones on in the background: finance bro Erwan (Joseph Olivennes) pontificating about wealth while doing a line of coke, and an intern (Sylvain Baumann) who humors him. The elder nudges the subordinate to join him on a tour of the restricted areas, then proceeds to undress in Louis XIV's bedroom and urinate on the tapestry. Security soon arrives, prompting the miscreant to flee and run through the streets sans trousers.
He hides out at Le Roi Soleil (lit. Sun King; also the film's original French title), a bar-P.M.U. (uniquely French state-sanctioned establishments for placing bets) in Versailles where the story largely remains. Regular patron Mr. Kantz (Claude Aufaure) drops in to check the latest lottery numbers and indiscreetly announces he has won the 294 million Euros (roughly $334 million U.S.) jackpot.
Hothead Comar (Nemo Schiffman) jumps the literal gun by picking up a weapon carelessly left on the counter by two plainclothes cops, Livio (Pio Marmaï, Happening) and Reda (rapper Sofiane Zermani). They successfully intervene, but not before Mr. Kantz gets hit and their colleague Abel (Panayotis Pascot) catches a stray.
Instead of calling for backup and paramedics, Livio and Reda naturally command the barkeeper, Nico (Pan Xianzeng), aka Yinan, to lower the security grilles so they can figure out a masterplan to keep the winnings among the survivors trapped inside. Still, that doesn't prevent Nico's landlord, Picon-Lafayette (Maria de Medeiros, Pulp Fiction), from intruding through the back entrance using her set of keys.
Cardona relays the story in an interesting way, replaying and restaging many scenes multiple times from different angles and perspectives, each with slightly diverging performances and dialogue. We first get a glimpse of this gambit while Abel is out back talking on the phone as he waits for a takeout order. This ploy pays off later when one of the alternate takes turns out to be a fantasy or hypothesis, as Livio and Reda change the race of the perpetrator to Black (with Robert Moundi standing in) because, in their warped minds, the story they concoct would be somehow much more plausible with racism.
Yes, how terrible of them. At the same time, they don't go about othering immigrants like Nico and his hired hand, Esmé (Lucie Zhang). Cardona's representation of diversity is not mere window dressing, and the Chinese characters aren't tokens. They are very much integral parts of this ensemble. We get to see them conversing in Mandarin and experiencing microaggressions and outright bigotry from customers. In this sense, No One Will Know passes what Manohla Dargis has coined as the DuVernay Test with flying colors. Kudos to Cardona.
As the what-ifs and paranoia begin to set in -- did Mr. Kantz always play the same numbers? -- the body count grows. Though the proceedings never veer too far from Le Roi Soleil, they never instill a sense of claustrophobia. Cardona, cinematographer Brice Pancot, and editor Flora Volpelière have done wonders to engage and keep things from getting stale.
While No One Will Know is a top-notch thriller indeed, Cardona has designs on making it a cautionary morality tale. Aside from the opening sequence, there's a brief period interlude toward the end in which Cassanova (Giovanni Funiati) pitches the idea of a national lottery to Louis XV (Arnaud de Montlivault) to save the kingdom from financial ruin. It's superfluous and heavy-handed, but there's no mistaking the film for a genre exercise.
