Parallel Tales Cannes Film Festival Screenings Review Roundup: Asghar Farhadi’s French-language Cannes Competition drama has drawn a divided response from critics. Arriving with a major ensemble led by Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel, Pierre Niney and Adam Bessa, the film has been praised by some reviewers for its ambition, craft and layered storytelling. At the same time, several critics argue that its ideas about voyeurism, fiction and reality become overconstructed, emotionally distant and frustrating.
The film follows Sylvie, played by Isabelle Huppert, an aging novelist living in Paris who begins watching a woman across the street through a telescope while searching for inspiration. Because Sylvie can see but not hear what is happening inside the opposite apartment, she starts inventing fictional lives for the people she observes. In her imagination, the woman becomes Anna, played by Virginie Efira. As Sylvie’s writing begins to blur with reality, other characters played by Vincent Cassel, Pierre Niney and Adam Bessa become part of a widening web of observation, invention and interference. The film is loosely based on Dekalog 6 / A Short Film About Love, the Krzysztof Kieślowski story about watching, longing and emotional projection.
The sharpest split among critics appears to be over Farhadi’s meta-storytelling. For some, Parallel Tales is a clever and playful expansion of Farhadi’s usual moral drama. For others, the film’s structure becomes too busy to carry real emotional weight. Pete Hammond of Deadline responded positively, calling the film entertaining, smartly executed, twisty and smart. He also described it as wickedly entertaining and argued that Farhadi has created something wholly original and deliciously crafted. In his reading, the film’s layers are part of its pleasure, allowing Farhadi to build a story that keeps shifting between what is seen, what is imagined and what is eventually revealed.
Tim Grierson of Screen Daily had a more reserved response. He called the film intriguing but ultimately frustrating, arguing that its cleverness becomes superficial as the plot grows more convoluted. For Grierson, the film’s characters often feel less like fully formed people and more like chess pieces being moved around the board to serve the film’s design. That criticism gets to the center of the negative response: the issue is not that Parallel Tales lacks ideas, but that its ideas sometimes seem to overpower its people.
David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter was also unconvinced by the film’s execution. He described Parallel Tales as elegant but frustrating, saying that it uses voyeurism as a starting point to reflect on truth and imagination, but keeps circling itself with diminishing traction. Rooney’s review called the film “an intriguing premise that becomes contorted and dull,” and argued that its 2-hour-20-minute runtime feels lethargic. He also wrote that not even Zbigniew Preisner’s haunting score can bring much feeling to what he saw as a terminally underpowered movie.
That criticism is especially important because Rooney places Parallel Tales against both Farhadi’s earlier work and the long cinematic history of voyeurism. He notes that countless major films have used watching as a dramatic engine, from Rear Window and The Conversation to Peeping Tom and Body Double. But where those films turn observation into suspense, guilt, desire or danger, Rooney suggests that Farhadi’s film becomes more like a bloated metafiction exercise than a lived-in story. In his view, the film keeps the setup of Kieślowski’s Dekalog 6 and retains Preisner’s score, but loses the emotional precision of the original material.
David Ehrlich of IndieWire also took a harsh view, with his review framing the film as an aimless work whose deluxe ensemble cannot help it find its compass. That line has become one of the clearest summaries of the negative side of the Cannes response. The problem, according to this group of critics, is not the cast or the production value. It is the sense that the film’s narrative machinery keeps expanding without finding enough emotional force underneath.
The ensemble has still received attention across the reviews, though not always in the same way. Pete Hammond praised the cast and saw the performances as part of the film’s appeal, especially in the way the characters become tangled in Sylvie’s act of watching and writing. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian also found the film intricately crafted and thoughtfully acted, even while calling it somewhat nebulous and overlong. For Bradshaw, the film has intellectual and formal interest, but it does not always land with the clarity or emotional sharpness that its premise promises.
Other critics were less convinced that the cast could overcome the writing. David Rooney argued that the deluxe ensemble led by Huppert and Efira cannot help the film find its direction. Tim Grierson was similarly critical, suggesting that Huppert’s Sylvie feels too flimsy as a struggling author and that Efira is limited by a role that does not give her enough dimension. This creates another major divide in the response: some critics see the ensemble as a major strength, while others feel the actors are trapped inside an overly schematic design.
Farhadi’s shift in style has become one of the biggest talking points around the film. He is best known for moral dramas built around family, marriage, social pressure and the consequences of small decisions. Films such as A Separation and The Salesman are remembered for their tightly controlled emotional and ethical conflicts. Parallel Tales, however, moves into a more self-conscious fiction-reality puzzle. It is about a writer who watches strangers, turns them into fiction, and then finds the boundary between invention and life becoming unstable.
For critics who admire the film, this shift gives Farhadi room to experiment. Pete Hammond sees the result as playful, smart and stylish, with the filmmaker using the premise to build a layered drama about imagination and consequence. For critics who are less persuaded, the same shift becomes the problem. Tim Grierson argues that the film savours storytelling mechanics more than character depth, leaving the audience only intermittently engaged. David Rooney similarly suggests that the film reaches for psychological complexity but becomes bogged down in overcomplicated plotting.
One of the film’s more interesting formal ideas is its use of sound and silence. Sylvie can see the people across the street, but she cannot hear them. That gap becomes the space where imagination enters. She creates dialogue, motivations and emotional lives for people she is only partly observing. This is also where the film connects to the world of sound design, since some of the characters across the street work with sound and foley. The idea gives Parallel Tales a strong conceptual hook: what we see is incomplete, what we hear may be invented, and fiction often begins in the gap between the two.
Pete Hammond responded strongly to this aspect, praising the sound work and treating it as central to the film’s design. In his view, Parallel Tales is not simply about looking at people from a distance, but about the missing information that turns watching into storytelling. Peter Bradshaw also engaged with the film’s interest in voyeurism, imagination and blurred reality, though he remained more cautious about whether the film’s many layers fully cohere.
The main criticism across the more negative reviews is that Parallel Tales becomes overlong, overbuilt and emotionally underpowered. David Rooney found the film lethargic at 2 hours and 20 minutes, saying its intriguing premise eventually becomes contorted and dull. Tim Grierson said the plot becomes convoluted and unrealistic, with tidy coincidences and pseudo-ironic twists piling up. David Ehrlich saw the film as aimless despite its cast and pedigree. Peter Bradshaw, while more measured, also described the film as intricate but nebulous and overlong.
Still, the Cannes response is not one-sided. Pete Hammond of Deadline gave the film one of its strongest notices, calling it wickedly entertaining, twisty, smart and deliciously crafted. His review suggests that Farhadi’s experiment works if viewers accept the film as a playful construction rather than a conventional emotional drama. A more positive response also came from Le News, which described the film’s script as intense, fluid and multi-layered. TheWrap also appears interested in the film’s ideas about observation, storytelling and the responsibility that comes with turning other people’s lives into fiction.
At the Cannes Film Festival screenings, then, Parallel Tales seems to have drawn a split but serious response. Pete Hammond of Deadline saw a smart and entertaining work. David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter found an elegant but frustrating film that becomes contorted and dull. Tim Grierson of Screen Daily called it intriguing but ultimately frustrating. David Ehrlich of IndieWire viewed it as aimless despite its deluxe ensemble. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian found it thoughtfully acted and intricately made, but nebulous and overlong. The more positive readings from Le News and TheWrap suggest that some critics found value in its layered structure and storytelling questions.
What makes the response interesting is that critics are often describing the same qualities in opposite ways. The film’s construction, its meta-fictional design, its emphasis on watching and imagining, and its layered relationship with Kieślowski are all seen as strengths by some and weaknesses by others. For those who respond to Farhadi’s experiment, Parallel Tales becomes a smart and formally playful reflection on fiction, truth and responsibility. For those who do not, it remains trapped inside its own design, asking viewers to admire the structure without giving them enough emotional reason to care.
The final consensus from Cannes is that Parallel Tales is an ambitious but uneven Competition entry. It has a strong cast, an elegant premise and a fascinating idea about the distance between seeing and knowing. But critics are divided on whether Farhadi turns that idea into a fully satisfying drama. Positive reviews call it smart, twisty and carefully crafted. Negative reviews call it aimless, overlong and emotionally thin. As a Cannes screening title, it is being discussed less as a failure than as a film whose ambition is clear, but whose execution has left critics sharply split.
Film: Parallel Tales
Original Title: Histoires Parallèles
Director: Asghar Farhadi
Writers: Asghar Farhadi, Saeed Farhadi
Based on: Dekalog 6 / A Short Film About Love by Krzysztof Kieślowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel, Pierre Niney, Adam Bessa, India Hair, Catherine Deneuve
Runtime: 2 hours 20 minutes
Language: French
Festival: Cannes Film Festival 2026, Competition
Music: Zbigniew Preisner
Cinematography: Guillaume Deffontaines
Editing: Hayedeh Safiyari
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