Cannes 2026 Opener 'The Electric Kiss' Blends Grief and Romance in a Stylized Carnival Drama

Like the run-down carnival in which it is set, Pierre Salvadori’s “The Electric Kiss” is a little clunky, kind of messy, and oddly entertaining. While it didn’t start the 2026 Cannes Film Festival with a bang on Tuesday night—the evening’s biggest star was Honorary Palme d’Or winner Peter Jackson, who received his award in a ceremony preceding Salvadori’s film—the movie was at least fun to watch as it veered uneasily but charmingly between melodrama, romp, tragedy, and romantic comedy.

In a way, this is par for the course for Cannes, which in recent years has given its opening-night berth to a string of movies that delivered sporadic pleasures but were never among the highlights of those festivals: Amélie Bonnin’s curious “Leave One Day” last year, preceded by Quentin Dupieux’s goofy “The Second Act”, Maïwenn’s inert “Jeanne du Barry”, Michel Hazanavicius’ wacky “Final Cut”, and Leos Carax’s wild musical “Annette.”

The Electric Kiss takes place in the Paris of 1928 and begins at a carnival where the sideshow barkers promise excitement and wonder, but the looks of drudgery on the faces of performers and customers suggest otherwise. A woman in a red cloak, Suzanne (Anaïs Demoustier), trudges through this picturesque and stylized landscape with a look that lands midway between desultory and defeated. As “Venus Electrificata,” she’s one of the establishment’s star attractions, though she earns that status not because of any particular skill, but because she’s pretty and willing to endure pain.

She stands on a stage with her hands above a pair of orbs while a barker invites men to kiss her—and when somebody pays to do just that, a backstage switch is flipped, electricity surges into the orbs, jumps to her hands, travels through her body, and gives the would-be suitor a shocking experience that the more dimwitted take to be love.

Suzanne, we learn later, was sold to this carnival by her family at the age of 15, and she endures a life of painfully burned hands for a pittance: When she gets her weekly pay, it amounts to less than nine francs after expenses. So it’s no surprise that she steals opium from the more lavish trailer where a purported psychic, Claudia, conducts séances, rubbing it on her hands as a painkiller and helping herself to a bit of Claudia’s food while she’s at it.

Before she can leave the trailer one night, she runs into a grieving artist, Antoine (Pio Marmaï), who offers her a substantial sum of money to contact his late wife, Irene. Suzanne fakes it, using tricks of the psychic trade that she picked up while lurking around Claudia’s trailer—and before long, she’s making house calls to Antoine’s place, where he’s been unable to paint since his wife and muse died a few years earlier.

The film is about layers of deception: Suzanne pretends to be Claudia and pretends to be a skilled medium, but it’s all a