Meteors Review: The Bleak Hues of a Friendship

Hubert Charuel’s Meteors is a dreary and cold meditation on friendship and the impact of addiction in colorless provincial France.

Even with a few missing parts at the foundation of its character building, the film manages to skillfully put together all the other parts it does have to assemble a poignant character journey.

Mika (Paul Kircher) and Daniel (Idir Azougli) are long-time friends and roommates who are forced to reflect on their destructive lifestyle after they’re caught red-handed and face legal consequences for their actions. Out of desperate need for money, Mika and Dan volunteer to work for their friend Tony (Salif Cissé) at a nuclear dumping ground. Their time feels finite. They’re set on bettering themselves, but it might be harder than planned.

We are dropped into the lives of Dan and Mika as they struggle to make ends meet. On a random night drive, they stumble upon a wealthy family home with a valuable “prize-winning” cat outside that Dan immediately captures with the intention to sell it. Chaos ensues in the car as they squabble back and forth about going back or running away while the cat goes missing in the dark.

This jumbled sequence of events, leading up to the inevitable inciting incident – getting caught with proof of drunk driving and security footage of theft – serves to establish Dan and Mika’s recklessness and desperation. Quite clearly, up until that point, they had been living without the worries of tomorrow. Yet this is all we know about these characters, as in the havoc of it all, the film misses addressing questions that would provide more background on our central duo.

“Why are these people friends at all? Why are they the way they are? What hides behind the drinking?” In any film that’s so heavily reliant on a leading friendship duo, it’s important to understand the essence of the friendship in question early on, because the characters’ decisions that push the narrative forward are also driven by friendship. Here, without at least a sense of an answer, the friendship feels imposed not only on the viewer but on the characters themselves. We get an immediate sense of their personalities and dire financial circumstances, but no sense of why they care for each other and, in turn, why the viewer should.

Luckily, Meteors quickly picks itself up from the initial flounder that is its introduction. About twenty minutes in, the film truly takes off, when the cost of their brashness forces Dan and Mika to slam the brakes and abruptly change course. Dan’s health takes a turn for the worse due to substance abuse and his poor prognosis causes a shift in both of them. The sudden realization of their lifestyle’s fragility and ephemerality provides the friends with a pressing objective to get their lives in order and turn over a new leaf while they still have time. We instantly understand why they’re set on vigorously trying to swim against the current.

Meteors immerses us in atmospheric hopelessness. The streets feel forgotten. There’s a stale sadness looming in the air, thriving on passivity and constantly threatening to take over. It’s woven throughout the compositions, the dialogue, and even the performances. All these elements help to emphasize why an escape to a better, more hopeful place needs to happen sooner rather than later for Dan and Mika.

Cinematographer Jacques Girault frames Upper Marne as a monotonous place that’s uninviting for the eye through a mostly static camera. The visual language of the film further builds on our understanding of the protagonists’ longing for something greater elsewhere.

Among the solid acting work here, Paul Kircher’s deceivingly simple performance remains the standout, as the general tone of the film distinctively matches the jaded tone of Kircher’s Mika. Meteors takes the story in a direction that gives his character enough time to shine through the deceptive exterior, because if you look long enough, you can notice a breathing subtlety in Kircher’s acting that’s easy to miss otherwise or be mistaken for stiffness.

We experience the second half of Meteors alongside Mika as the hopelessness the entire film is enveloped in gets increasingly thicker, harder to swallow. As Mika helplessly watches his friend destroy himself, the movie becomes more about addiction than anything else – specifically, healing from the influence of an addict and the devastating holes that addiction burns through the people who try to care. A tragic feeling somehow sneaks up in silence.

Hubert Charuel’s second narrative feature seamlessly gets you attached to its wandering characters without really noticing at what point between the knitting, coloring, and selling burgers it all happened. Out of their discouraging reality comes a simple, endearing depiction of two dreamers playing a game that feels rigged against them, without the resources to do anything about it, but they will die trying.

Meteors premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 19, 2025, in Un Certain Regard, and will be screened again on May 20-21.