La Gradiva Film Review: Constant Discovery

Marine Atlan’s miraculous film, La Gradiva, is a modern coming-of-age classic that dares to redefine the well-travelled genre.

The vividity of this work is scintillating; every scene has a tangibility to it that is so difficult to bring to the screen. The coming-of-age genre has been done many times before and will be again and again in the future, but La Gradiva brings fresh and exciting ideas to it with a startling clarity.

Enveloping like a patient snapshot over the course of several days, La Gradiva follows a group of students in their late teens on a class trip to Naples. Leading the group on their trip is Madame Mercier (a revolutionary Antonia Buresi, of Case 137, who steals your attention every time she enters the screen). Along with Pierre Mazoyer (Jane Austen Wrecked My Life), Atlan lenses La Gradiva with a warm nostalgia, opening with photos of Naples, Pompeii, and people who inhabited the area, before switching to digital film whilst still retaining a grainy, textured quality. Throughout the film, characters are sometimes obscured by darkness—the meaning behind the images, behind their and our daily lives, almost within reach but never quite graspable. The film boasts some of the best framing seen on screen this year.

La Gradiva has a wandering quality that might, in other films, lose the viewer’s attention. Atlan and Brouillet’s exquisite screenplay, coupled with encouraged improvisation amongst the young actors, ensures proceedings are always captivating. At the film’s core alongside Mercier are three students: Toni (Colas Quignard), Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin), and James (Mitia Capellier-Audat). The former is both troubled and a troublemaker, whilst the first time we meet the latter, he is having sex with another student on a train. Meanwhile, Suzanne is reserved but fiercely intelligent, a talented artist who is bullied and maligned by every other student. There are many stereotypes at play in La Gradiva, but they’re always utilised realistically.

Atlan’s film is amusing and joyous at times, but where it really sets itself apart from other coming-of-age dramas is in its evocative utilisation of history, and more specifically the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, as a means to spotlight its characters’ emotions and thoughts. Toni spends much of the film searching for his grandparents house in Naples, eventually realising that everyone’s parents, grandparents, and so on, have hidden depths and pains that you never noticed. Atlan and Brouillet’s script shines at another moment when Mercier describes a fossilised statue of a victim of the disaster and finds she is, in more ways than one, talking about her own stunted life. 

Like the students, we’re constantly learning new things about their lives and how they’re going to navigate adulthood. Bringing them to life is a terrific young ensemble, with Gerin and Quignard notable highlights; the latter gives what is undoubtedly one of the best performances of 2026. La Gradiva is happy and funny and heartbreaking, often in the same scenes, and it’s miraculous how smooth everything flows over the course of its 145-minute runtime. Wide in scope—Atlan touches on many themes, from history, politics, education, sex, mental health—La Gradiva still never loses sight of its captivating characters. Every viewer will find something to connect with here.

La Gradiva will be screened at the BFI London Film Festival on October 9, 2026. The film will be released in select U.S. theaters on December 18, 2026.