In Meteors, Hubert Charuel and co-writer Claude Le Pape deliver one of the most emotionally potent and visually singular films to emerge from this year’s Cannes Un Certain Regard. What begins as a gritty portrait of dead-end lives in France’s rural east evolves – unexpectedly, heartbreakingly – into a tender story about male friendship, addiction, and the invisible toxicity of nuclear waste and emotional dependence. It’s a buddy film laced with social decay, a movie without a meteor falling from the sky, and a melodrama that dares to cry.

Set in the economically stagnant wasteland of one of French provinces, Meteors follows three lifelong friends: Tony (Salif Cissé), who has climbed to dubious local success as a construction boss tied to a nuclear dumping site; Micka (Paul Kircher), caught between loyalty and burnout; and Daniel (Idir Azougli), whose alcoholism and downward spiral becomes the film’s emotional epicenter. Their reunion rekindles faint traces of hope, but with each step forward, they edge closer to collapse.

Charuel, who broke out with the César Award–winning Petit Paysan in 2017, returns to familiar territory – rural France, social precarity, men on the brink – but this time, the narrative scope is bolder, more intimate, and more surreal. Charuel and Le Pape strip away plot twists in favour of slow, suffocating realism, yet Meteors is never boring.

Much of this vitality comes from the chemistry of its central trio. Cissé, Azougli, and Kircher, each from vastly different parts of France, bring a lived-in authenticity to their characters’ bond. The result is sublime. You believe they’ve known each other for decades. You feel the weight of debts unspoken, of affection expressed only in bad jokes or botched rescue attempts. Their performances simmer with the kind of masculinity rarely shown onscreen: vulnerable, unglamorous, co-dependent.

The film is carried, in many ways, by Idir Azougli (Stillwater), whose portrayal of Daniel is haunting and humane. He captures the maddening contradictions of addiction – the sincerity behind false promises, the clarity within delusion. Rather than focusing the story on Daniel’s point of view, Charuel wisely centers Mika as the helpless witness, whose desperate efforts to “save” his friend expose the painful truth: love, no matter how fierce, is not always enough.

Beneath the main emotional story, Meteors looks at France’s nuclear industry in a way that feels unsettling and symbolic. The nuclear dumping ground becomes a literal site of ecological danger and a metaphor for the characters’ internal wastelands. Charuel and Le Pape articulate it plainly: people poisoning themselves to survive.

Visually, cinematographer Jacques Girault (who worked with Charuel on Diagonale du vide) creates a delicate palette of dusty pastels, shadowy interiors, and decaying industrial grays. The look, inspired by 16 mm film, adds warmth and a sense of vulnerability.

Meteors is a film about people with no safety net, and how friendship becomes both a source of salvation and suffocation. It’s also about male fragility, portrayed without irony or bravado. Remarkably, Charuel and Le Pape handle it all with grace.

Without a doubt, Charuel once again proves himself to be one of France’s most urgent and original filmmaking voices.

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Written by Maggie Gogler

Featured image courtesy of Cannes Film Festival

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