REAL FACES
(The 2025 SXSW Film & TV conference, ran March 7-15, and HtN has you covered with great coverage like Chris Reed’s Real Faces movie review. Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
As Real Faces, Belgian director Leni Huyghe’s debut feature, begins, lead character Julia (Leonie Buysse) is holding auditions for some kind of shoot, asking potential actors to repeat awkward lines like “my life is a party.” The why of that will make sense later, but as an opener it sets the stage for conflict to come, the absurdity of the phrase ringing out like a clarion call to break free from the chains of commercial imperatives. As it turns out, Julia is very much in need of liberation, and what happens next will set her on the path to emancipation.
After we meet Julia, we cut to Eliot (Gorges Ocloo), a lichenologist who gathers lichens from around Brussels to preserve and reintroduce into the city’s biosphere after new construction destroys old habitats. He’s revising his dissertation in the hopes of getting his Ph.D. to enhance his chances of a fellowship in Greenland (where there are many lichens to study). A gentle soul, he lives in a large apartment with his cat, Wasabi. Julia, looking for a place to stay, rents a room there. The film cuts between their respective lives, which intersect as they spend occasional time together.
We learn more about Julia’s project, which turns out to be casting for a perfume advertisement campaign on the theme of “Eurydice and Orpheus.” The director of the campaign, David (Yoann Blanc), is a self-described washed-out hack, and the ad he envisions is a compendium of clichés with which most viewers should be familiar, since they are ubiquitous in magazines and on billboards and screens everywhere. Unfortunately for Julia, beyond the soul-sucking nature of this work, she is not only required to find non-actors on the street—the titular “real faces”—but to ask them to utter inane lines in auditions and, later, to interact with each other in intrusive ways that make everyone uncomfortable. She also has to fend off passes from David. It’s a living, if not a good one.
Eliot, on his end, has his own struggles, academic in nature, to which are added Julia’s burdens when she encourages him to audition for the commercial. This tests the bonds of their fragile friendship and helps reveal to Julia the emptiness of the work she’s doing. Real Faces becomes a study in late coming-of-age, Julia forced to evaluate her choices and find a more meaningful path forward. The digital effects that the director brings in of Eliot’s lichens growing in the apartment where he keeps them underscore this need for rebirth and growth.
Huyghe proves adept at generating very fine performances from her actors, lead and supporting players alike, with Buysse and Ocloo developing a gentle, authentic rapport. Her cinematographer, Grimm Vandekerckhove, brings an immediacy to the drama, his handheld camera working in perfect concert with the characters. The film is populated with a diverse array of people—reflecting the cosmopolitan world of the European capital—who speak in Dutch, French and English, as needed. Everything feels genuine to the modern-day world in this vibrant examination of identity and longing. Real Faces generates real feeling, and draws us in with every frame.
– Christopher Llewellyn Reed (@ChrisReedFilm)
2025 SXSW Film Festival; Leni Huyghe; Real Faces
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