‘Another Day’ Review: Adèle Exarchopoulos in Graceful Addiction Drama

From Billy Wilder’s “The Lost Weekend” to the Sandra Bullock-starrer “28 Days” and beyond, cinema has a long tradition of substance abuse and recovery stories. There is something inherently cinematic and moving about a struggling person’s by-the-bootstraps journey to healing, with a lifetime’s worth of trials and tribulations. Just two years ago, Nora Fingscheidt’s tough but ultimately restorative “The Outrun” emerged as one of the best in this subgenre, showing both the all-consuming chaos of alcoholism with its unruly structure, and the serenity of the one-day-at-a-time mindset. More tame in its nature but still powerful, writer-director Jeanne Herry’s 2026 Cannes Competition entry “Another Day” is an addiction drama that is honest, patient and deceptively understated when it doesn’t err on the side of didacticism.

That intermittent educational feel (which especially weakens the ending) aside, “Another Day” is full of perceptive and compassionate details about how alcoholism can slowly sink its claws into the vulnerabilities of someone with the false promise of relief from life’s problems. In an authentic and genuinely lived-in performance, a terrific Adèle Exarchopoulos plays Garance, a talented Parisian actress who keeps busy enough in a well-respected and tight-knit theater company while also running from one audition to the next, and doing impressive voice work for extra income. Trying to stay afloat in an expensive city like Paris is tough enough, but piling onto Garance’s gig-economy hurdles is her terminally ill sister, and a romantic life that seems to be going nowhere.

Herry introduces us to Garance in the environment where she feels the most comfortable, on the stage and backstage, performing to engaged audiences in artsy spaces. When she isn’t perfecting her craft and looking for her big break on the heels of a breakup and terminated pregnancy, she reaches for a glass of white here and a bottle of red there, slowly losing her grip on concepts like time and place.

Among the most successful decisions Herry makes here is portraying Garance, at least at first, as a functioning alcoholic, a realistic yet not widely discussed state of being that many alcoholics experience while their illness goes undetected by loved ones. When booze first gets a hold on Garance, she only seems out of it in the moment. For a while, she manages to make it to work on time the next day, pay her bills, and even build a loving relationship with Pauline (Sara Giraudeau), a soft-spoken and compassionate artist who spends most of her days in the countryside. But as it is often the case, Garance eventually starts to lose control, while insisting she can cut down on her drinking if she wants to, as if alcohol is a non-issue in her life.

The reality, however, is quite different when she can’t keep up with appointments and promises she’s made, forgets entire conversations with people, slurs her words mid-performance and squanders professional opportunities that could change her life. At a school appearance where she’s supposed to talk about acting with little kids, she can barely keep it together in disheveled clothes and smeared make-up from the night before. In at least two scenes, Herry also unsubtly suggests that Garance might have been a victim of sexual assault during a blackout. She wakes up on a bus, unsure about why her ripped fishnets are rolled down to mid-thigh, and how she even ended up there.

Herry’s directorial panache especially shows in the way “Another Day” handles the passage of time. Set over the course of eight years (including the lockdown period during COVID), Herry’s film unfolds fluidly, neither hurrying scenes up unnecessarily, nor lingering too long on any incident. (If the film feels somewhat overlong at two hours, that’s mostly because of the repetitive nature of Garance’s condition.) Herry gives us full scenes of Garance performing and voice-acting with joy, and thankfully doesn’t time-stamp the escalating events of her life in rigid chapters.

Instead, she trusts the intelligence of the audience, and uses details in make-up and production design as markers of the story she tells chronologically, dedicating a generous amount of screen time to the committed relationship of Pauline and Garance. Thanks in part to editor Laurence Briaud, that easy and immersive structure aptly suggests that everything Garance experiences while her alcoholism advances happens during a single unit of time. Praise should also go to costume designer Ariane Daurat — in her hands, Exarchopoulos’ clothes recall a low-key version of her “Passages” wardrobe, combining edgy silhouettes with classically casual pieces.

While “Another Day” doesn’t necessarily intend to teach a lesson, there is still something too tidy and instructional about the way Garance decides to reclaim control alongside a helpful, no-nonsense doctor. All too aware that she might take Pauline down the same path with her, Garance ultimately decides to clean up her act because of her love for Pauline, which is a sweet detail: It’s rewarding to experience the emotional resonance of women selflessly prioritizing and caring for one another.

And yet, the comfortable resolution in the parting note feels all too schematic, like an after-school special; disappointing in a film that gives us something a lot more complex until then, including an excellent intervention scene between a defensive Garance and her theater troupe. Still, “Another Day” tackles a tough topic with profound grace. This kind of cinematic workmanship, so finely effortless that it’s almost invisible, doesn’t come by often.