The Courageous
With the cost of living crisis reaching an unprecedented scale across Europe, The Courageous is a timely look at the lived reality for so many low-income families. Against a backdrop of the Swiss mountains, Ophélia Kolb plays Jule, an eccentric single mother on the precipice of poverty and eviction. Despite her increasingly precarious situation, Jule does her best to give her three children – Claire (Jasmine Kalisz), Sami (Arthur Devaux) and Loïc (Paul Besnier) – a normal childhood. This means going to extreme lengths to maintain the façade, including stealing a cake loaf that Jule passes off as her own baking and attempting to squat in a seemingly vacant property that she claims to have bought.
Jasmin Gordon’s debut feature has a haunting quality to it. Sound is utilised through the intensity of the sylvan landscape; rustling trees and birdsong almost become a soundtrack in and of themselves. Some of the shots evoke the most famous works of Joseph Losey, notably a scene in which a car door serves as a makeshift split screen that emphasises the contrasting expressions of Jule and her children. The moment is devastating in its simplicity.
There’s more than a tinge of Life Is Beautiful to this tale of a mother keeping an illusion alive in order to protect her children from a grim reality. Accordingly, it’s a novel approach to a familiar story of single parenthood and poverty. All too often, the parent in such realist dramas remains stone-faced, angry, even abusive towards their children, as they navigate a hopeless state of socially sanctioned iniquity. But Jule remains positive to protect her kids by any means necessary, even when the astute Claire begins to suspect that her mother hasn’t been entirely truthful when it comes to the family’s financial situation.
Kolb is a marvel in an admittedly difficult role, flitting between desperation when confronted by those complicit in her suffering and unrelenting, beaming effervescence in the presence of her children. She has an effortless rapport with her young co-stars, with Kalisz in particular shining as a parentified child left to adopt a maternal role over her younger siblings.
The Courageous is a triumph of realist cinema. Its power is in its nuance, expertly shining a light on the inherent contradictions, and by extension, cruelty, within capitalism.
Antonia Georgiou
The Courageous is released nationwide on 5th September 2025.
Watch the trailer for The Courageous here:
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