Director: Stéphan Castang
Something is trying to kill Vincent, and nobody can say what it is or why. Stéphan Castang's 2023 French-Belgian genre hybrid turns an ordinary office worker's life into a slow-motion siege, blending science fiction dread with pitch-black comedy.
What is Vincent Must Die about?
Karim Leklou plays Vincent, a graphic designer whose evenings and mornings are suddenly punctuated by violence: strangers lunge at him on the street, colleagues turn hostile without warning, even a child in a playground seems ready to attack. There is no visible trigger and no pattern he can decode. As the assaults multiply, Vincent loses his job, his apartment, and his sense of who is safe to be around. He goes into hiding in the countryside, where he meets Margaux (Vimala Pons), a woman who has been living the same nightmare and has learned to survive it. Together they try to work out what connects the people who snap in Vincent's presence, and whether the phenomenon can be contained, escaped, or only endured. The film keeps its explanation just out of reach for most of its runtime, favoring mood and character over exposition.
Cast & crew
Karim Leklou anchors the film with a performance built on exhaustion and dawning panic rather than action-hero resolve, which keeps the premise grounded even as it turns strange. Vimala Pons gives Margaux a wary, hard-won competence that plays well against Leklou's spiraling confusion, and the supporting cast — including Hervé Pierre and François Chattot — populate the film's ordinary settings with faces that could plausibly turn dangerous at any moment.
Context & significance
Vincent Must Die premiered as part of Cannes' Critics' Week in 2023 and drew comparisons to body-horror and outbreak narratives while carving out its own tone, closer to absurdist thriller than pure horror. Director Stéphan Castang, working from a script co-written with Mathieu Naert, uses the fantastical premise to explore isolation, workplace precarity, and the fragility of everyday trust rather than leaning on jump scares.
Where & how to watch
Vincent Must Die streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing, and the film's page is free to browse without an account. Watching the film itself requires signing in with a free K-Time login, and the interface — menus, search, and recommendations — is available in Farsi for viewers in the Iranian diaspora.