Loosely adapting “A Short Film About Love” into a long film about nothing, Asghar Farhadi’s cramped and tedious “Parallel Tales” forfeits the sordid humanity of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s masterpiece in exchange for the soapy meta-fiction of a meandering daydream. Both movies hinge on transgressive acts of voyeurism, but this one, which more self-consciously explores how the world can be shaped by the mere act of watching it, struggles to find anything of interest to show us.

Where Kieślowski trusted in the richness of what spying on strangers might reveal about ourselves, Farhadi — dead in the water without the narrative thrust of his signature neorealism — bends over backwards to contrive a flimsy house of mirrors that’s ultimately too dim to reflect anything beyond the limits of his own imagination. 

It’s possible I’m being a bit too harsh toward a fundamentally unserious thriller about a homeless guy who gets a little too invested in the idea that some local foley artists might be fucking behind each others’ backs, but it’s hard to forgive a movie that makes you want to fast-forward whenever Isabelle Huppert shows up on screen.

Trapped in a one-note role that nods to “Monsieur Hire” but would be lucky to earn comparison to “The Woman in the Window,” the iconic French actress stars as Sylvie, a reclusive novelist of unclear renown who starts relying on her telescope in lieu of other inspiration. For reasons that are sufficiently explained by Virginie Efira’s face, Sylvie decides that “Anna” — the name she assigns to the blonde sound engineer who works at the post studio across the street — will be the muse for her latest book. Sylvie decides that Anna is married to her colleague “Christophe” (Pierre Niney), but secretly having a torrid affair with their older boss Pierre (Vincent Cassel, perfectly cast to affirm such assumptions). 

“Parallel Tales” brings Sylvie’s new manuscript to life by dramatizing its different chapters across the first half of this movie. These scenes — semi-confoundingly written in the first-person, and visually distinguished from “reality” by virtue of a dour blue tint that drains them of what little vitality Farhadi and Massoumeh Lahidji’s script is able to muster — imagine that Sylvie’s narrator is spying on the apartment where she was raised as a child. The same apartment where her mother cheated on her father, causing him to move across the street and then eventually jump to his death. 

We suspect that Sylvie is drawing those details from personal experience, though Farhadi neglects to confirm or deny if that’s true, as doing so would undermine the point of a film about how reality is a byproduct of the fantasies that we project upon it. The good news is that it doesn’t really matter either way, because Sylvie’s editor — played by Catherine Deneuve, in a drive-by performance that probably required less of her time to shoot than “Parallel Tales” demands of our time to watch — thinks the manuscript is absolute dogshit. 

“My stories are from another time,” Sylvie laments, suggesting that people don’t care about hot French people fucking each other anymore because of woke. And that’s that. Back to miserably shuffling around her mice-ridden apartment and counting down the days until she’s due to move out. It’s always fun to see Huppert scowl at the world and blow smoke in its face, but Farhadi gives her almost nothing else to do, even — or especially — after a strange young man with a piercing gaze shows up and starts trying to impose Sylvie’s fanfic onto the real lives of the people who inspired it. 

His name is Adam (“Extraction” star Adam Bessa), he’s roped into Sylvie’s orbit after he chases down a pickpocket who robs her niece on the Metro, and he’s happy for any excuse not to spend another night in the shelter, even if that means helping a pissy old writer to pack up her shit. Dull for the same reason that Farhadi is drawn to him, Adam is an empty shell of a character without a past — a blank page who’s easily seduced by Sylvie’s voyeuristic novel because he’s excited by the potential of inventing people out of whole cloth. He makes a copy of the book before she trashes it, internalizes it as his own, and begins to insert himself into the action in an effort to spur it along… or something. 

A dime-store Patricia Highsmith sociopath in a movie whose spirit owes more to Georges Simenon, Adam fits so awkwardly within this story — within any and all of the stories of which it’s comprised — that he flattens them all into a shared condition of unreality. He stalks Anna, whose real name is Nita, with the subtlety of a vampire that has wet blood dripping from its teeth, and though an errant piece of voiceover insists that Adam is galvanized by the thrill of forcing his imagination upon her, “Parallel Tales” does absolutely nothing to dramatize his pleasure for us. 

Instead, we’re treated to a series of agonizingly torpid scenes in which Nita and her co-workers are incepted by the power of Adam’s fiction, which comes to assume the force of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It turns out that Cassel’s character is the one who’s in a relationship with Efira’s, and Ninney is his sniveling younger brother, but a gander at Adam’s freehand slop is all it takes for him to grow paranoid that his girlfriend is getting up to no good with his arthritic sibling. As tends to be the case in Farhadi’s work, a little push is all it takes to send people spiraling towards their doom.

And so, with the same callousness that he disposes of the family of mice who breed in Sylvie’s apartment, Adam begins to destroy the film workers across the street. Farhadi is a master storyteller whose films thrive in the corners that most screenwriters avoid at all costs, but “Parallel Tales” fails to find the pleasure or the tension in even the simplest of tropes (which come to include murders, ghosts, and people spying on people who are spying on people), and Farhadi’s unfussy direction mimics the forced intimacy of Kieślowski’s style without any trace of the moral constriction that held it together. 

The only evidence of a clearer take on this material can be found in Farhadi’s attention to sound, his film cleverly separates from the silent images that Sylvie and Adam see through their telescope. I don’t know if we needed to spend quite so much time watching Efira and Ninney re-create the noise of birds flapping their wings or lions clawing their way across the savannah (their overworked characters are doing post on what looks like the world’s most generic nature documentary), but “Parallel Tales” perks up whenever it flirts with the idea that reality is as piecemeal as the parts of a film, its disparate elements only forged into coherent meaning by the narcissism of the human mind.

The world is composed of the infinite stories we tell ourselves about it every day, almost all of which are more interesting — and more believable — than the one Farhadi chooses to share with us here. 

Grade: C-

“Parallel Tales” premiered in Competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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