Stéphane Brizé directs A Good Little Soldier, starring Alba Rohrwacher and Vincent Lindon, screening at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival. This one hits close to home and hits all the right notes so I can’t see how it doesn’t end up being one of my favorite films of 2026.
Plot in a nutshell
Carla (Rohrwacher) is a successful corporate executive who recently joined a huge insurance company as the new HR director. She must balance employee well-being with the exacting demands of the company’s CEO (Lindon), all while trying to co-parent her son whom she sees every other week. While trying to figure out the direction of a new corporate brand video, an employee brings her a serious case that implicates a highly-valued team leader and she finds herself in a difficult position.
The Review
It’s a rare feat for a film to work on as many levels and layers that A Good Little Soldier works on. It’s observational workplace comedy meets slice-of-life corporate nightmare, it’ll have audiences doing belly laughs one moment and digging their fingernails into their seat a few scenes later.
This is a film that cuts deep for anyone who has experienced a corporate environment, the toxic politics that bubbles underneath, the relentless pressure to overachieve, the board meetings where you feel like you have to agree with the most ridiculous things, the hypocrisy of it all. Brizé nails so much of what office life is like, and he captures all of this in such a compelling way, that every scene in A Good Little Soldier is packed with purposeful energy and momentum. It’s absurdly gripping.
The tonal notes of the film are also a marvelous balancing act. It’s filled with the kind of laugh-out-loud humor that comes with cringe comedic satire of The Office, until it naturally devolves into a genuine crisis. Once Carla is confronted with this scenario which is best left unspoiled, the scenes that follow in her office with the parties involved are some of the most intense and bone-chilling interactions of any on screen all year. Watching Clara navigate through all of this, and slowly eat herself from the inside in the process, is one of the most savage character studies I’ve seen in a long time.
Apart from the brilliant screenplay, which deservedly won the Venice prize, the film wouldn’t have worked without the commanding performance from Rohrwacher. She phenomenally conveys the delicate predicament of a woman stuck between needing to be a cutthroat executive that’s all business, an HR director who genuinely cares about the employees of the company but also someone who has her own KPIs, and a mom trying to be present in her son’s life.
Vincent Lindon is also pretty much perfect as the no-nonsense CEO, who provides much of the comedy in the first half of the film, but then becomes something quite else in the second. Not a lot of actors can pull off both of these registers within the same performance but Lindon hits it out of the park.
Everything - from the music, to the editing, to all the other elements that work together to make something cinematic - is in perfect sync to create an atmosphere of corporate dread, despair and loneliness. Carla’s isolation, from her family, from her colleagues, from everyone who takes the public transport with her every day, is captured with a scary precision.
Find a way to watch this movie, in cinemas if you can, as soon as possible. You won’t regret it.