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Movie releases. "The Sun King" with Pio Marmaï and Sofiane Zermani: a clever thriller about a jackpot

Movie releases. "The Sun King" with Pio Marmaï and Sofiane Zermani: a clever thriller about a jackpot

A bar, a winning ticket, eight strangers and a dead man: what could possibly go wrong? A cruel but clever fable, The Sun King , in theaters this Wednesday , questions not only our relationship with money, but also with truth.

The Sun King was presented in the Midnight Screening at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. Photo Emmanuelle Jacobson-Roques

The Sun King was presented in the Midnight Screening at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. Photo Emmanuelle Jacobson-Roques

It couldn't have come at a better time for Le Roi Soleil , the fact that a French player won €250 million in EuroMillions last week. Because this win triggered our imagination , to dream of our ideal vacation or the beautiful house we'll buy with this very illusory sum - except for one lucky person. However, the power of our thoughts and our relationship with money are the major subjects of Vincent Maël Cardona's new feature film, after Les Magnétiques .

If we are indeed in Versailles, the Sun King in question is not Louis XIV, but a rather old-fashioned bar-PMU, owned by Madame Picon-Lafayette (Maria de Medeiros), and run by Nico (Xianzeng Pan). On this dreary morning, we find there, among others, the waitress Esmé (Lucie Zhang), two cops at the end of their shift (Pio Marmaï and Sofiane Zermani), an ambulance driver (Panayotis Pascot)... and Monsieur Kantz (Claude Aufaure), a nice old man who is a regular at the place, who will have the luck to win the jackpot in the lottery draw and the misfortune to die in the process. For the witnesses present at the bar, the stakes are high, because by making a little adjustments to reality and their consciences, they could still leave with the money. Obviously, it won't be as simple as expected...

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If the relationship with money is necessarily at the center of The Sun King , the strength of the film is to link this subject with our capacity to imagine and especially to twist reality. All this while making maximum use of the possibilities of the seventh art, via winks to certain genres or even more directly in the unfolding of the feature film, which does not hesitate to retrace its steps on numerous occasions, without losing its viewers.

For while The Sun King demonstrates great cinematic mastery and proves to be a thrilling closed-door drama, the bar's patrons, blinded by the lure of profit, will quickly discover that one cannot improvise as the director of one's own story so easily. A cruel but clever fable.

The Sun King by Vincent Maël Cardona, in theaters this Wednesday, August 27. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes.

L'Est Républicain

L'Est Républicain

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