Dany Boon and Philippe Katerine headline The Lion, a 2020 French feature from director Ludovic Colbeau-Justin in which a psychiatric patient insists he is only pretending to be unwell, and the man paid to care for him slowly starts to wonder whether that might be true.
What is The Lion about?
A patient in a psychiatric hospital has a story he tells anyone who will listen: he is not ill at all, merely acting the part. The caregiver assigned to him treats this as the usual bluster of the ward and gets on with the job. Yet the longer the two spend together, the harder the caregiver finds it to dismiss what he hears. The patient's composure slips only when it seems to suit him, his explanations hang together a little too well, and a professional's certainty begins to crack. Is the man a fantasist, a manipulator, or exactly who he says he is? The film turns that single doubt into its engine, letting the shifting relationship between carer and so-called protégé set the pace from the first scene onward.
About the cast
Dany Boon and Philippe Katerine carry the two central roles, and the film depends on the friction between them: one man certain of his own sanity, the other paid to measure it. Around the pair, Anne Serra, Sophie Verbeeck, Carole Brana, Ophélia Kolb, Stana Roumillac and Samuel Jouy fill out the world of the hospital and beyond, their reactions nudging the caregiver's judgement first one way and then the other.
Context & significance
Released in 2020 and running a brisk ninety-five minutes, The Lion sits inside a long French tradition of two-hander comedies built on a mismatch: a straight man and a wild card locked into a situation neither of them chose. Colbeau-Justin's film adds the hospital setting, where the question of who is sane carries real weight rather than serving as a simple punchline. The K-Time catalogue files the title under musical, so viewers should not expect a sober clinical drama; the tone leans toward the playful even as the central doubt sharpens.
Watching The Lion on Ktime
The Lion streams on K-Time with a Persian dub, so the dialogue can be followed without reading subtitles. This page is free to read; to press play you need a K-Time account and a login. Once signed in, the Farsi interface lets you find the film under its Persian title, شیر, or under the original French-language name.