Knife+Heart (Un couteau dans le cœur) is a lurid, hypnotic love-and-murder odyssey set in late-1970s Paris. Writer-director Yann Gonzalez mashes up giallo thrills, queer nightlife, and a bruised love story: Anne, a once-celebrated director of gay adult films, tries to win back her editor and ex-girlfriend Loïs by making her boldest movie yet—just as a masked killer begins targeting the men in her troupe. Neon colors, dream logic, and an M83 score turn grief and obsession into fever-dream cinema.
Paris, summer 1979. Anne (Vanessa Paradis) is spiraling after Loïs (Kate Moran)—her editor, collaborator, and great love—walks away. Determined to prove she’s still dangerous and desirable, Anne teams up with her flamboyant producer-friend Archibald (Nicolas Maury) to shoot a “comeback” feature that might lure Loïs back.
Then the murders start: one of Anne’s actors is found dead, and soon others across the city are attacked by a leather-masked figure. Police interviews, clues, and a black feather pull Anne toward a decades-old rural tragedy involving a barn fire, a disfigured survivor, and a love that was punished instead of protected. Rather than retreat, Anne pours the chaos into her film—re-staging interrogations, sprinkling in pulp, and pushing her cast to the edge. On premiere night, art and reality collide in the dark. Loïs pays the ultimate price, the killer is unmasked, and Anne is left with a community that refuses to be terrorized—and a film that now aches with absence.
Knife+Heart Cast
Charactor
Anne’s ex and editor: exacting, private, the quiet center Anne keeps orbiting. Loïs’s boundaries force Anne—and the film—to confront what love costs.
Kate Moran
Kate Moran (Saint Laurent, You and the Night) gives Loïs a cool gravity that sharpens every scene with Paradis.
Producer, best friend, den mother of the troupe. He turns chaos into shoots and hurt into gallows humor.
Nicolas Maury
Nicolas Maury (Call My Agent!) brings generosity and comic snap, embodying the film’s chosen-family core.
Director
Yann Gonzalez
Gonzalez builds a queer giallo where camp and compassion co-exist. He treats the 70s porn micro-industry as a found family, not a punchline, and lets music, color, and memory do as much storytelling as dialogue. With brother Anthony Gonzalez (M83) on score, the film pulses like a club track haunted by a requiem.
BEST SCENES
📍 Opening club prologue: a cruising sequence veers from flirtation to terror, announcing the film’s neon-noir grammar in one breathless set-piece.
📍 Anne’s “documentary” restaging: she turns a police statement into cinema—brazen, tasteless, and heartbreakingly honest about her need to control the narrative.
📍 The rural digression: grainy flashbacks and whispered lore stitch the killer to an old barn fire, connecting the present to a punished first love.
📍 Premiere night: the film-within-the-film screens; reality intrudes; the audience becomes a wall of protection. Love, loss, and community collapse into one operatic beat.
Knife+Heart Review
Review
⭐ Story (4/5)
At heart it’s a break-up movie wrapped in a slasher. The investigation tracks grief more than clues, and the final reveal links the killings to past trauma and social cruelty. It’s pulpy, yes, but the emotions ring raw.
⭐ Acting (4/5)
Vanessa Paradis plays Anne as wounded bravado: furious on set, small in private. Kate Moran’s cool restraint makes Loïs feel like the one person Anne cannot direct. Nicolas Maury is a scene-stealer as Archibald, the ride-or-die producer who keeps the messy “family” together.
⭐ Chemistry (4.2/5)
Anne × Loïs is the film’s heartbeat—tender, toxic, undeniable. Their push-pull gives the neon spectacle real stakes, and every creative decision becomes a love letter or a plea.
⭐ Production (4.5/5)
Gonzalez shoots like he’s channeling Argento and De Palma: saturated reds/blues, stylized compositions, and playful split-focus flourishes. M83’s synth score floats between club euphoria and elegy, binding the murders, the movie-within-the-movie, and Anne’s despair.
⭐ Ending (4/5)
The climax is tragic but thematically precise: cinema can memorialize love, not resurrect it. The community’s final act of defiance reframes the film as grief-powered survival.
💬 My Take
Knife+Heart is messy on purpose. It understands how artists metabolize pain—by stylizing it, replaying it, even exploiting it—and asks where love ends and appropriation begins. The genre frame lets Gonzalez talk about violence against queer bodies without turning them into pure victims: the community fights back; the film becomes a memorial and a manifesto. For lesbian cinema, Anne × Loïs is the throughline—two women who can’t stop editing each other—and that’s why the ending lands.
Knife+Heart Information
🎖 Awards & Recognition
Cannes Film Festival (2018) – Official Selection, Main Competition
Widely noted for its M83 score and bold neo-giallo style; a polarizing title that earned ardent cult admirers.