There is something genuinely unsettling about making a movie where your own family is the villain. That is exactly what Emmanuel Marre did with A Man of His Time, a French period drama that won best screenplay at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. The film is inspired by the story of his own great-grandfather, a man who walked into Vichy France in 1940 carrying copies of his self-published political manifesto and decided that aligning himself with the Nazi-collaborating regime was the smart play. This is not a movie about a monster. It is a movie about a guy who convinced himself he was doing the right thing, which is somehow worse.
Swann Arlaud plays Henri Marre, and if you know Arlaud at all, you know he does not take soft roles. This is the same actor who picked up César Awards for Bloody Milk, By the Grace of God, and Anatomy of a Fall. Three César wins across three wildly different films. He plays Henri as a broke, estranged, deeply self-deluding social climber who arrives in Vichy with ambitions and no moral floor. Critics at Cannes called his performance superb.
What makes the film feel genuinely exciting rather than just important is how Marre shoots it. The Hollywood Reporter's Jordan Mintzer described it as feeling like "a grungy indie flick" where everyone is wearing period clothes but behaving exactly like people do now. The Screen Daily review compared its themes to Jonathan Glazer's Zone of Interest, that same cold examination of what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. But where Glazer kept his camera at a clinical remove, Marre reportedly goes grungier and more uncomfortable, using anachronistic music and hard lighting that makes formal dinners look like interrogations.
The film runs just under two hours and forty minutes, so it is not a casual Tuesday watch. But boutique distributor 1-2 Special has picked it up for North America and is planning a theatrical release next year. These are the people who also acquired Christian Petzold's Miroirs No. 3 and Harris Dickinson's directorial debut Urchin, so their taste is basically bulletproof. If you want to get ahead of the conversation now, pull up Zone of Interest on Tubi, which is streaming it for free. Then come back to A Man of His Time when it arrives. The two films are clearly in conversation, and this one has the added weight of being personal in a way almost no WWII film ever is.
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