Guru: what is the new Pierre Niney worth? (critical)

This thriller about influence and speech is less about what it says than what it shows. But can we film the speech without being a prisoner of it?

Everything is in place from the first scene. An overheating body, a man facing the crowd, a speech that promises everything – absolutely everything. From this (operatic) opening, Guru does not deploy: it engages. The rest will be a spiral: Yann Gozlan does not tell the story of the rise of a coach (played by Pierre Niney) but orchestrates its descent into hell, as if the film, having laid down all its cards from the start, only had to observe the consequences.

Very quickly, a question arises: how to film a world saturated with speech without adding a layer? How to stage the word without dissolving into it? Guru advances on this ridge line. He shows seminars and TV shows, but seeks his anchor elsewhere: in bodies, objects, images that crack rather than explain. A rifle leaning against a wall. An ice bath, too quiet. A suddenly empty face. These moments – discreet, cruel and trivial – where the film stops talking to watch, are the most accurate.

This is where Gourou shifts towards film noir, in the moral sense. Not the story of an unmasked imposter, but that of a chain of events: the more the character speaks, the more the frame isolates him, imprisons him. This tension makes the singularity of a film which stands between two contradictory necessities: making cinema with discourse, while seeking not to be a prisoner of it. Often, the staging prevails, creating doubt and ambiguity. Elsewhere, the film follows its subject more closely, at the risk of highlighting and reducing the critical distance. There remains this final injunction: do not believe what is said. Believe what is shown. Gourou is not a thesis film, but a mise en abyme attentive to its own words. A paranoid thriller that seeks to question its images as much as its speeches.

By Yann Gozlan. With Pierre Niney, Anthony Bajon, Marion Barbeau… Duration: 2h06. Released January 28, 2026