Child (2026)
Child is a film I admired and argued with in almost equal measure. For a good long stretch it is a lean, harrowing moral drama, and then it takes a hard turn into somewhere far stranger, and I came away genuinely torn about whether that swerve was brave or a misstep. Cyrus Neshvad, the Luxembourg director Oscar nominated for his short The Red Suitcase, makes his feature debut here, and you can feel a real film-maker wrestling with a big, dark idea.
It opens in a grim, gripping register. A couple's young son is dying and in desperate need of a transplant, and they set off on a fraught journey, through checkpoints and back roads, towards the only option they have left. That option is a black market exchange, cash for an organ, and the father is being kept in the dark about just how far his wife is prepared to go to save their boy. This early stretch is tense and morally queasy in the best way. It asks what a parent would do, what line they would cross, for their own child, and for a while it looks like it might become a properly devastating piece of work.
Then the film changes shape. On the road home, something begins to stalk the couple, a strange, half-human presence that tips the whole thing out of grounded drama and into creature-feature territory. I honestly could not tell whether it was meant as metaphor, the monstrousness of what they had done made flesh, or a comment on the lengths we go to for the people we love, or whether it was simply a lurch into Sci-Fi Channel monster-movie land. That ambiguity is the film's biggest gamble, and it is where it started to lose me.
Because that is my central frustration with it. The bones of a truly wrenching film are right here, a story about a sick child and the unbearable pressure that comes with that, and part of me wishes Neshvad had simply trusted it. Instead he reaches for horror, and while the result is never boring, it does dilute the gut-punch the setup had promised. What keeps it standing is the craft. It moves at a brisk seventy-eight minutes and never outstays its welcome, the performances from Brigitte Urhausen and Malik Zidi as the parents are committed and grounded, and the make-up and effects are better than the budget has any right to deliver.
So I land, after a fair bit of wrestling, on three and a half stars. It is not quite the film I wanted it to be, and I suspect the tighter, bleaker drama hiding inside it would have hit far harder. But there is real ambition on show, a strong central idea, and enough craft and nerve that I am genuinely curious to see what Neshvad does next. Go in knowing it will not stay in the lane it starts in, and you may well admire the swing even in the moments it does not quite connect.
Reviewed from a screener provided by the film's UK press team. Child is Cyrus Neshvad's feature debut, following his Academy Award nominated short The Red Suitcase, and is in UK and Irish cinemas from 2 October.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country Luxembourg: Song of the Sea (2014), Ernest & Celestine (2012), It Was Just an Accident (2025)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More thriller: Electric Meat (2026), The Girl We Let In (2026), Once Upon a Time in Gaza (2025)
