Every day our dystopian future gets closer. The new French science fiction film from Cédric Jimenez (The Stronghold) offers the latest glimpse into our future. A predictive AI overlord named Alma uses facial recognition, GPS tracking, and anything else in her deployment to bring crime to a halt. The tactics Alma uses in her war on crime will be familiar to many Americans right now; thankfully, the film is in French, which means the president and his cadre of hooligans will never watch it and find inspiration from Alma’s even worse ideas.
A near-future Paris is divided into zones. Zone 1 is where all of the money is, so naturally, it is the safest and most secure. Things are mostly good in Zone 2 too. Salia (Adèle Exarchopoulos) polices the zone and has a bright future in the police department until she gets wrapped up in a cross-zone investigation into the death of Alma’s inventor. She gets Zem (Gilles Lellouche), a much older Zone 3 officer, to escort her through the impoverished third zone where it’s always rainy and the sun never shines.
The zoning looks a lot like class apartheid. Personal freedoms, like the right to movement, do not exist in the same way in the zone of the proletariat. The main political task for Alma and her capitalist overlords benefiting from her rule is to “stabilize” the third zone. All resistance to the system created by the new tech-lords comes from outside the system. The men in power view the “anti-zone” group known as the Breakwalls as seditionists or terrorists, and even though they did not kill Alma’s creator, they take the blame. Their leader, played by a bohemian-appearing Louis Garrel, turns himself in to prove to Salia that his group is blame-free.
There is an obvious Blade Runner inspired aesthetic of incongruent images of futuristic wealth and modern poverty in a dark sci-fi world where it’s always raining and occasionally illuminated with neon lights. Exarchopoulos and Lellouche are as tremendous as we’ve come to expect, but the ambiguity about a romantic connection between the two gets icky with the multi-decade age gap. The black bob that Exarchopoulos dons is instantly sartorially from the future just by being a cute and defined look, with sharp geometric edges that scream “future!” on the cunning edge of today’s fashion landscape. The pop score does the reverse and instead points back to the present, as if to say “I’m not that far away.”
According to an interview with the director, ALMA was “created” using an AI voice “like Chat GPT.” I would be surprised if this was the film’s only employment of actual AI in bringing its AI to life too. A few of the in-world visualizations and predictions from Alma certainly look like they might be machine-generated: mathematically precise, clumsy movement, and visual details of diminishing quality.
Dog 51 ends the way all French films do: in a riot. I jest…but only a little. There is obviously an inspiring tradition of left-wing collective action in France and in French cinema. The filmmakers recorded a video to play at TIFF 2025 apologizing for not being able to join us at the festival. The reason they couldn’t make it in person? The ongoing general strike prevented them from flying. In a way, it’s a fitting circumstance to pair with the film. The French in Dog 51 and in real life right now both certainly do something right: fight when their rights are being taken away.
Dog 51
2025
dir. Cédric Jimenez
100 min.
Screened as part of the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival
