Only What We Carry

With Only What We Carry, Welsh filmmaker Jamie Adams once again embraces a form of cinema built less around a conventional screenplay than around the volatile chemistry of actors placed in a confined setting. Shot in only six days and developed largely through improvisation, the film assembles six characters in Deauville, where professional resentment, romantic uncertainty and the fear of becoming irrelevant gradually turn a seemingly elegant coastal escape into an emotional pressure cooker. The method is daring, particularly with a cast this eclectic, but it is also unforgiving: when an exchange finds its rhythm, the film feels spontaneous and intimate; when it does not, the pauses, repetitions and unfinished thoughts are exposed with nowhere to hide. What emerges is a curious, uneven chamber drama whose most compelling ideas concern the invisible baggage carried by artists long after the applause has faded.

At its centre is Charlotte Levant, played by Sofia Boutella, a former Moulin Rouge dancer whose career and identity have become painfully entangled with celebrated choreographer Julian Johns, portrayed by Simon Pegg. After reading an interview in which her former mentor and lover boasts that he can turn anyone into a dancer, Charlotte Levant interprets the remark as an attempt to claim ownership of her talent. Accompanied by her older sister Josephine Chabrol, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, she travels to Deauville to confront him. Julian Johns, meanwhile, has withdrawn to the coast to work on his memoirs with the encouragement of wealthy publisher John Percy, played by Quentin Tarantino. Also drawn into this improvised gathering are hotel employees and aspiring artists Jacqueline, played by Lizzy McAlpine, and Vincent, played by Liam Hellmann. Their youthful ease offers a contrast to the older characters, who speak endlessly about freedom while remaining prisoners of choices made years earlier.

The most interesting tension is not simply romantic but professional. Charlotte Levant is trying to determine whether Julian Johns nurtured her talent or exploited it, and whether their sixteen-year collaboration gave her a career while quietly taking possession of it. His defence—that pressure creates excellence—is precisely the sort of maxim once celebrated in rehearsal rooms and increasingly recognised as a convenient excuse for cruelty. The film is strongest when it allows that ambiguity to remain unresolved. Simon Pegg, cast against his familiar comic warmth, makes Julian Johns unsettling precisely because he does not play him as an obvious monster. He is vain, manipulative and astonishingly incapable of understanding why his version of their shared history should not be accepted as the definitive one. Yet he also appears genuinely lost without the woman whose creativity helped sustain his reputation. A late confession briefly reveals the frightened artist beneath the swagger, even if the improvised structure has not built enough momentum for the moment to land with its intended force.

Sofia Boutella has the film’s most difficult assignment. She must embody depression, artistic humiliation, grief and anger while playing a woman who repeatedly converts private pain into public spectacle. At times, her fragmented delivery seems less like a carefully observed breakdown than an actor still searching for the scene’s destination. Then Charlotte Levant stops talking and dances, and the film suddenly discovers the eloquence it has been chasing. In that brief passage, Sofia Boutella communicates more through movement than pages of circling dialogue manage to express: pride, fury, muscle memory and the terrifying possibility that the body on which she built her identity may no longer guarantee her a place in the world. It is a revealing contradiction in a film so committed to conversation that its most honest moment arrives without words. Neema Sadeghi’s handheld cinematography supports this closeness in the quieter passages, capturing the Normandy light and the melancholy of spaces that are luxurious yet strangely empty, although its restless movement can occasionally turn intimacy into visual distraction.

The unexpected centre of gravity is Quentin Tarantino, returning to a substantial acting role three decades after From Dusk Till Dawn. Rather than dominate the film with the verbal bravado associated with his own work, he plays John Percy as a wealthy, nervous and faintly ridiculous man who often appears to be asking permission to occupy his own surroundings. His first flirtatious gambit—comparing Josephine Chabrol’s oversized suit and glasses to Gordon Gekko, the corporate predator played by Michael Douglas in Wall Street—is so peculiar that it becomes oddly charming. Even more memorable is the surreal sight of him addressing a tree with complete sincerity, a moment that could have escaped from a different film yet perfectly expresses this character’s social disorientation. His rapport with Charlotte Gainsbourg provides the story with its warmest and funniest current. She brings understated melancholy to a married woman tempted by the possibility of another life, while never disguising the selfishness beneath that temptation. Their attraction is improbable, but its awkwardness makes it more persuasive than a polished screen romance would have been.

The younger couple should widen the film’s perspective, but Lizzy McAlpine and Liam Hellmann are given too little material to become more than observers, admirers and reminders that artistic ambition looks different before disappointment has settled in. This imbalance points to the larger weakness of Jamie Adams’ experiment. The film raises provocative questions about abusive mentorship, ageing, grief, marriage, creative ownership and the economic gap between powerful artists and the people who serve them, only to glide across most of them. Its conversational freedom often produces stammering detours rather than revelations, and the concise 92-minute running time can consequently feel much longer. The influence of Éric Rohmer and Jean-Luc Godard is visible in the wandering exchanges and faith in accidental truth, but improvisation alone does not create the moral precision of the French New Wave. Too often, these privileged characters complain in beautiful surroundings without the film finding the distance required to challenge them—or the empathy required to make their unhappiness fully contagious.

Yet Only What We Carry is not without value. Its imperfections are inseparable from its sense of risk, and there is something admirable about watching recognisable performers surrender the safety of tightly engineered dialogue. The film resembles an emotionally charged weekend that becomes fascinating only when retold: exhausting and embarrassing while it is happening, but punctuated by images and confessions that remain in the memory. Jamie Adams does not entirely transform his collection of regrets into a coherent drama, but he occasionally captures the cruel moment when artists realise that love, influence and possession have become impossible to separate. The result is neither the profound meditation it reaches for nor the empty vanity project it sometimes threatens to become. It is an erratic, intimate experiment, elevated by Simon Pegg’s wounded severity, Charlotte Gainsbourg’s delicate humour and, most surprisingly, Quentin Tarantino’s disarming vulnerability.

Only What We Carry
Written and directed by Jaime Adams
Produced by Charles Finch; complete producing credits not publicly announced
Starring Simon Pegg, Sofia Boutella, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Quentin Tarantino, Liam Hellmann, Lizzy McAlpine
Cinematography: Neema Sadeghi
Edited by Cécile Lapergue
Production companies: Atlas Pictures
Distributed by NC
Release dates: 
Running time: 93 minutes

Seen on 9 September 2026 at the Deauville International Centre