Leos Carax’s Annette is not a movie you watch it’s one you survive. A delirious, darkly romantic rock opera penned by Sparks, this is cinema as exorcism: a swirling storm of artistic ego, toxic love, and puppetry so unsettling it borders on horror. Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard don’t just perform here; they’re sacrificial lambs on the altar of Carax’s wild, untamed vision.

Driver’s Henry McHenry is a monster masquerading as a provocateur, his stand-up act less comedy than public self-flagellation. When he howls “We Love Each Other So Much” with Cotillard’s ethereal soprano Ann, the irony is thicker than the film’s perpetual rain this isn’t a love story, but a slow-motion car crash of mutual destruction. And then there’s Annette herself, a marionette-child whose uncanny presence turns the film’s second half into a grotesque fairy tale.

The music all jagged rhythms and recursive lyrics lodges in your brain like a splinter. Carax shoots in lurid greens and sickly yellows, his camera lurching between claustrophobic close-ups and surreal dreamscapes. It’s exhilarating, exhausting, and often deliberately alienating.

Annette won’t meet you halfway. It’s a film that demands surrender to its absurdity, its ugliness, its fleeting moments of transcendent beauty. By the end, you’ll feel like Henry’s audience: complicit, unsettled, and weirdly changed.