Nino

“The body is man’s true biography: the rest is literature.”
 — Philip Roth

Nino is not a film that lends itself to a superficial reading; it is rather an inner journey, a map of uncertainties unfolding within the domestic sphere, along city streets, and through the silences of communication. In her feature debut, the director offers not so much a drama about illness as a delicate, profound meditation on time, identity, and the fragility of existence.

The central problem in Nino is not merely a failing body, nor simply the diagnosis or physical pain; it is an existential fracture, a threshold moment that forces one to question what one truly is — and what one can still become. The film’s gaze remains close to the everyday — to simple gestures, interrupted breaths, the act of communicating with those you love — yet within the everyday lies the possibility of profound transformation.

Particularly moving is the way the film handles the theme of fertility preservation — the act of conserving sperm as a gesture that speaks to the future. It is not a technical detail but a promise the self makes to its own tomorrow, a way of affirming that one’s life will not be reduced to illness, that it still reaches toward what is not yet, toward the possibility of affective continuity. Loquès employs this narrative pretext with great elegance: she neither exploits it for easy emotion nor allows it to become pathetic. On the contrary, it becomes an opening — a focal point for reflecting on the relationship between what we lose and what we hope for, between what of us survives in others’ memory and what may persist along a timeline we never chose.

The film’s style is sober yet rich in nuance. The direction avoids the rhetoric of the hospital, the tearful cue, the heroic gesture; instead, it favors shadows, small fractures in language (an interrupted sentence, a glance displaced in time), and the suspension between normality and disorientation. At times, a light irony emerges — not to trivialize suffering but to return to the protagonist his humanity, his youth, his imperfection.

Nino leaves questions lingering long after the credits. What does it mean to be young when the future is suddenly taken away, even for a moment? How do we orient ourselves when life demands decisions we thought were far ahead? What is the value of a changing body, of a voice that falters but still longs to be heard? And above all: how can we speak of love, belonging, and family when illness calls everything into question?

The film suggests that illness, for all the horror it brings, can become an opportunity for sincerity, for depth — pushing us beyond our habitual roles, beyond superficiality, forcing us to see what we usually ignore when everything seems “normal.” It does not say that pain is beautiful; rather, it says that within pain, within precariousness, lies the possibility of revision.

A film that peers into the interstices of the soul, that does not resolve but accompanies, Nino is a rare experience — a lesson in gentleness in its deepest sense.

Théodore Pellerin’s performance is extraordinary: he embodies Nino with a delicacy that transcends technical acting. The truth of the character emerges in the uncertainty of his movements, in the way he responds to the outer world — to the friend preparing his birthday party, to his mother, to his ex. Pellerin doesn’t seek emotional omnipotence; instead, he allows space for emptiness, silence, the trembling of the voice. And it is precisely there that the film finds its authenticity.

“To be alive is so strange that at times it feels like an illness.”
 — Clarice Lispector