Amir GanjavieDir. Alexe Poukine | Critics’ Week, Cannes 2025
At first glance, Kika unfolds like a gentle romantic prelude: twilight in Brussels, a bicycle in need of repair, a chance meeting that sparks into love. But this calm is fleeting. David, Kika’s partner, dies suddenly, and what begins as a love story quickly becomes a portrait of solitary endurance.
Kika—played with aching vulnerability by Manon Clavel in her first major role—is left pregnant and alone, already mother to a young daughter. A social worker herself, she now finds the social system indifferent to her own crisis. In the face of mounting debts and emotional exhaustion, she searches for survival beyond the margins of conventional morality.
She turns to sex work—specifically, BDSM. Not as a descent, but as a deliberate choice in a world of dwindling options. With no prior experience, she enters the domain of ritualized power, restraint, and care. The velvet rooms of love hotels and dominatrix alcoves become spaces of labor, but also—paradoxically—spaces where a kind of control, even clarity, is possible.
Director Alexe Poukine draws on her documentary roots to build a film that avoids cliché. There is no sensationalism here, no miserabilism. Kika is deeply rooted in social realism, treating sex work not as spectacle but as survival. More importantly, it presents BDSM not as perversion but as a sophisticated choreography of desire, vulnerability, and negotiation.
Deleuze would remind us that desire is not lack but production. In Kika, desire manifests in multiple ways—not just sexual, but existential. The desire to be a mother. The desire to hold onto one’s dignity. The desire to rewrite pain into agency. Kika’s engagement with BDSM is not just economic—it is also, in its own understated way, a transformative practice of self-making.
One of the film’s most poignant tensions lies in Kika’s ambivalence around motherhood. She wants to keep the child—that much seems clear—but the cost of doing so, without a partner, without support, is crushing. This isn’t a story of rejecting motherhood, but of confronting how much it demands, and how little help it elicits. Poukine delicately unpacks the societal pressure placed on women to mother selflessly, while revealing the punishing structures that make that expectation nearly impossible to fulfill alone.
Kika also grants rare narrative space to male vulnerability. The men who visit her are not caricatures but complex figures, seeking out play, containment, or confession. These sessions are not depicted as erotic spectacle but as windows into human fragility—messy, awkward, oddly intimate.
What makes Kika quietly radical is that it doesn’t dramatize its politics. It moves gently, attentively. It dignifies spaces that cinema often treats with scorn. The supporting characters—especially the women—are drawn with care. The final act of the film pulses with emotional force, not because it imposes catharsis, but because it allows Kika to remain complex, unfinished, and present.
In a world where women’s choices are relentlessly judged, Kika offers no verdict. It gives us something rarer: the space to witness a woman trying, failing, resisting, surviving. Not to be a symbol—but to stay human.
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