The French royal family of King Louis XVI awaits their fate while imprisoned by revolutionaries at the Tour du Temple in The Flood (Le Déluge), which premiered at last year’s Locarno Film Festival and is now playing in Prague cinemas (with English subtitles at Edison Filmhub). This story of how the elite are stripped of their divinity—and imbued with humanity—on their way to embracing mortality keeps a cool distance from its characters and is rarely engaging, but it’s elegantly crafted, memorably performed, and as timely as ever in 2025.
Directed by Gianluca Jodice, from a screenplay co-written with Filippo Gravino, The Flood stars Guillaume Canet as Louis XVI, who with wife Marie Antoinette (Mélanie Laurent), their two children, the king’s sister Madame Élisabeth (Aurore Broutin), and a small retinue arrives at the Tour du Temple toward the end of the French Revolution in 1792. Here, they will be kept in isolation from a public out for blood while Robespierre and other officials determine their fate. The film reconstructs this enclosure with clinical precision, presenting the Temple as both a physical cage and a psychological purgatory where status evaporates and humanity becomes an unavoidable last resort.
Structured in three distinct acts, The Flood begins with the shock of displacement. Jodice presents the family’s arrival not as a spectacle but as an erasure. The Temple’s interiors are austere, nearly empty, stripped of the ornamentation the royals once took for granted. The walls feel desolate, and the rituals that once defined royal life are reduced to brittle performances of dignity.
Despite this, early scenes show the family still clinging to some notion of elevated status. In an early scene, Louis XVI is asked by one of the guards to heal a sick friend suffering from tuberculosis with his royal touch, a tradition once believed to carry divine power. But when the men reveal it was a crude joke at his expense, the humiliation lands with quiet devastation. The edifice of royalty has crumbled; the king finds himself not only powerless but mocked for the very mythology that once legitimized him.
The Flood‘s middle section shifts toward an examination of shared humanity between the prisoners and their captors. Not only does the royal family begin to appreciate that they are now equals with the common folk—those around them recognize a shared humanity. Rather than painting the revolutionaries as faceless antagonists, Jodice allows their grievances, grief, and contradictions to surface.
A memorable moment comes when the captain in charge of the prisoners (Hugo Dillon) tells Marie Antoinette about his two-year-old son who starved to death. The scene does not serve to vilify the queen further; instead, it reveals her instinctive protectiveness toward her own children, which the captain intimately observes. For viewers aware that her young son would himself die of malnutrition in captivity, the exchange carries an added, tragic resonance.
Both guards and prisoners are humanized through their limited agency and compromised circumstances. The film suggests that the Revolution’s machinery dehumanized everyone caught in its gears. Yet this thematic elegance occasionally keeps the drama at arm’s length. Characters are illuminated but rarely felt; they embody ideas more than they inhabit emotional realities.
The film’s final act confronts the inevitable verdict; Louis’s acceptance is played with a stoic calm by Canet. His most powerful scene arrives the night before his execution, when the man who will operate the guillotine meets him and explains, with procedural detachment, exactly what will happen. Jodice holds the camera in a slow, creeping zoom toward Louis’s face as he absorbs every detail. Canet excels here in quiet realization, portraying a man discovering—not choosing—grace in the face of death.
Marie Antoinette, by contrast, breaks the film’s muted emotional palette with a sudden outburst. Laurent plays her collapse not as melodrama but as a delayed eruption of fear and frustration. It is a departure from portrayals that tend to frame her as frivolous or stoic; here, she is painfully, recognizably human. The contrast between the couple—his containment, her anger—forms one of the The Flood’s most compelling dynamics. Among strong supporting performances, Fabrizio Rongione stands out as Jean-Baptiste Cléry, Louis XVI’s valet whose historical journals provide the primary account of the king’s final days.
Daniele Ciprì’s cinematography uses Italian locations to convincingly approximate the lost Parisian setting; shortly after the events of the film, Napoleon ordered the Temple demolished to prevent royalists from venerating the site. First-rate sets and costumes evoke a certain authenticity, while Fabio Massimo Capogrosso’s orchestral score is lush and imposing—sometimes too imposing, overwhelming quieter emotional beats.
Yet for all its craft, The Flood is marked by a flat storytelling. The narrative rarely surprises, and Jodice’s intellectual approach keeps viewers at a distance. Compared with more adventurous work like Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, this depiction is content to state rather than probe, to illustrate rather than interrogate. Its central thesis—that royalty is not divinity but humanity in disguise—certainly lands, but is not always dramatically urgent.
The film’s title, drawn from the phrase “après moi, le déluge” (“After me, the flood”)—attributed not to Louis XVI but to his predecessor Louis XV—adds a layer of historical irony. Taken as a nihilistic shrug at the chaos that would follow his reign, it resonates here as both prophecy and lament: the deluge arrives not only for France but for the monarchy itself. And as the divide between the haves and have nots widens past historic levels in our contemporary society, The Flood serves as an important reminder of the inevitable outcome.
