Nino (France 2025: Dir Pauline Loquès)

The Nino of the title (Théodore Pellerin) is the personification of thousands of young men living in Paris. He's 28, on the cusp of 29, quiet and unassuming, currently single and working in a fairly uninspiring job. While attending a hospital one Friday, ostensibly to pick up a sick note for his employer, he gets a shock; the sore throat from which he's been suffering is actually cancerous, the result of a long dormant sexually transmitted disease.

The polite but direct doctor schedules him for immediate chemotherapy, starting the following Monday. As if that wasn't enough to take in, she also suggests that he donate his sperm as quickly as possible in that the treatment's potency will render him infertile.

Spat out onto the Paris streets, dazed and frightened, Nino returns home only to find that he's mislaid his door keys, and the building's concierge is absent. And so begins a weekend that we spend with the young man, in which the camera never takes its eye off him (Loquès places Pellerin front and centre in every scene; he's unable to escape our gaze) as he spends time with his mother (Jeanne Balibar), an ex who's in the process of moving to Montreal and to whom he may have transferred the infection, at a 'surprise' party in his honour, and finally with an old school chum (Salomé Dewaels) who he meets by chance.

The joy of Nino - if that's the right word for a movie about a man struggling to come to terms with a cancer diagnosis - is that the film resists mawkishness. We may feel immediate sympathy for the young man but his biggest battle is how to conquer the isolation in which the diagnosis has placed him, while preparing to tell his friends and loved ones.  

But Pellerin is supported by a handful of remarkable performances from the supporting cast. He and Balibar have some of the most intimate scenes in the movie; as mother and son their relationship is obviously close, and when Nino tries to explain the news from the hospital - which she mistakenly thinks is him about to confess that he's transitioning - he ends up telling her he's being treated for depression, possibly feeling guilty about how the cancer originated (later on, Balibar's ex husband Mathieu Amalric turns up in a cameo role). 

Nino is Loquès's first feature, and she's ably assisted by some superb cinematography by Lucie Baudinaud and fine editing by Clémence Diard, both resisting flashiness but effortlessly capturing Nino's fractured, distracted sense of himself and his surroundings. It's a simple but effective film, and at its centre is a casually riveting performance by Pellerin.

Nino is on release from 19 June 2026.