Featured Essays The City of Lost Children The City of Lost Children: A Surreal French Fairy Tale for the Ages Perfect for fans of mad scientists, precocious orphans, stolen dreams, and family families. By Tim Ford | Published on August 26, 2025 Credit: Studio Canal Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Studio Canal The City of Lost Children’s opening scene ends with nearly a full minute of non-stop wailing from adult men: “Un vrai asile de fous!” (a veritable madhouse), as the film’s original screenplay describes it. It’s deliberately off-putting, bizarre, and chaotic, and it brilliantly sets the tone for what’s to come in the French science fantasy film, which was released thirty years ago. It’s an anniversary worth celebrating for a film that remains criminally overlooked. The City of Lost Children is a dark movie, both literally and figuratively. The elaborate, stunning-but-gloomy, Jules Verne-esque retrofuturist set is illuminated by sunlight in only a couple of scenes, and the plot is in the vein of the Grimmest of Grimm’s fairy tales. A malevolent Frankenstein-style creation, Krank, inhabits an abandoned oil platform near an unnamed coastal town, employing a cult of “cyclops” (men who have ritualistically blinded themselves, and are able to see using cybernetic enhancements made by Krank) to snatch children away from the nearby port city. We learn that Krank is unable to dream, and this condition is causing him to rapidly age. By kidnapping children and connecting them to a machine that lets him experience their dreams, Krank hopes to prolong his unnatural existence. There are, to put it mildly, imperfections in this plan. The screaming that fills the memorable opening scene is caused by Krank experiencing a nightmare through one of his stolen children, and he is so deranged by this experience that he snatches the child’s teddy bear and repeatedly slams it against the controls before tossing it into the sea. This is uncannily like watching an infant having a tantrum—despite his aged appearance, Krank is, in fact, very young, possibly as little as a year or two old. Indeed, most of the adults in The City of Lost Children behave in a way that belies their supposed maturity. Krank is accompanied by several narcoleptic clones of his creator who play pranks, sing childish songs, and pull faces behind his back. He is also assisted by a small woman, Martha, yet another creation of the scientist, who styles herself as Krank’s mother and encourages him to embrace the clones as his “brothers.” Over in the city itself, circus strongman One, played by Ron Perlman, speaks in short, simple sentences, with a soft, innocent, even naive, demeanor. There’s also a pair of conjoined twins named “the Octopus” who function as the Fagin-like leaders of a gang of orphan thieves and pickpockets straight of Oliver Twist, cackling with wild abandon when they narrowly evade danger, all while bullying the children under their sway with schoolyard malice. Their chief enforcer is a lazy cutthroat who growls at his dog yet whines comically about his mistreatment by the Octopus. It’s left to the literal children of this world to behave rationally and maturely in the face of all this chaos. When Krank steals away Denrée, a three-year-old under the care of One, the strongman is utterly helpless until he crosses paths with Miette, the most talented of the young thieves in the Octopus’ gang. Miette has a brilliant mind for thievery, taking charge of her fellow orphans and executing ingenious tactics, such as a Rube Goldberg-style method of key retrieval involving a mouse, some bits of cheese, a magnet, and a cat—it must be seen to be believed. Yet she faces life with a world-weariness that would be more fitting on a noir detective three days from retirement than a nine-year-old. Miette has seen it all. When One tells her how he first discovered Denrée, hungry and crying in a trash bin, she is harshly dismissive and practical, insisting that Denrée is “too little” for them to help him. It’s only when she sees the sincere grief and loss One is going through that she offers her assistance. It’s clear that despite her disaffected demeanour, Miette has a profound longing to be loved and accepted. Child actor Judith Vittet plays her with striking subtlety alongside Ron Perlman, who is perfectly cast in the role of One. The language gap (Perlman, an American actor, does not speak French) only serves the role, allowing One to feel even more out of his depth alongside the clever, streetwise Miette. Perlman also injects his performance with a pitch-perfect portrayal of a simple man genuinely trying to be a “big brother” to these kids. In the hands of another actor, some of the more intimate scenes between Miette and One, like when they huddle together for warmth, could potentially feel… off. With these performers, there is never a question of impropriety, and there’s a genuine softness to their relationship that is wonderfully touching. That softness is directly at odds with the grim surroundings of the City of Lost Children, and it’s directly tied to the overarching themes and to the unique creative pairing that makes the film so effective, and so memorable. The City of Lost Children is the second feature film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, and, to date, their only other collaboration after 1991’s Delicatessen, which was the feature debut of the French filmmakers. Jeunet is probably best known to US audiences for his Academy Award-winning film Amélie (2001), although he is also remembered as the director of the troubled Alien: Resurrection (1997). His decision to make that film led to an amicable creative split between Caro and Jeunet, for while Jeunet was willing to work in an established universe with someone else’s rules, Caro opted out, contributing some costume designs but otherwise declining to take on a project he had no creative control over. It’s an interesting trajectory, because the influence the two filmmakers had on each other is strikingly evident in The City of Lost Children. Delicatessen maintains cult status in the memories of sci-fi and arthouse fans, but is, ultimately, a more indie project with a modest budget. With The City of Lost Children, the filmmakers were truly able to realize their shared vision and make the movie they’d wanted to make for years—In fact, they had a first draft written as early as the 1980s, before Delicatessen was made. Caro’s particular visual style, honed as a comics artist and designer, is all over the production. In interviews for an HD re-release of The City of Lost Children, the filmmakers were thrilled that the film could finally be seen with a vibrancy of colour that only shows in 4K, showcasing the beauty in the metallic greens, reds, and blues that glisten on the practical sets, which they noted inspired awe in both the child actors and in Ron Perlman. But where Caro’s influence on Jeunet is most evident is in the darker aspects of the movie’s tone and plot. In one of the re-release interviews, Jeunet recollects that their first version of the script’s opening scene had Krank toss the child himself into the ocean, rather than taking his rage out on the teddy bear. “[Production Designer] Jean Rabasse came in and said ‘that will freak children out,’” Jeunet says. “I saw that he was right. We almost did something stupid.” Caro smoothly interjects, however, to point out that early Disney films like Pinocchio or Snow White could also be very dark. “There are really scary scenes,” Caro says. “Read any fairy tale by Grimm or Perrault.” It’s a terrific encapsulation of how the two directors’ personalities balanced out to create The City of Lost Children, which itself is about the interplay between childhood and adulthood, and how adults can quite literally prey on the innocence of children, with Krank acting like a kind of psychic vampire as he steals the dreams of children. Jeunet offsets Caro’s grim, Steampunk-ish world with just the right touch of lightness and optimism, a glimmer of the feeling that infuses Amélie. Thus, the film allows a tiny light of hope that glimmers even in the (literal and metaphorical) darkness surrounding the titular lost children—the hope that in spite of everything, they might no longer be lost and alone. There’s a clear dichotomy at play between Krank, Martha, and the clones on the one hand and Miette, One, and Denrée on the other. In the case of the former, Martha and Krank adopt the trappings of a family, holding a birthday party for Irvin, the last, unwilling member of their little science experiment clan. Irvine is a literal brain in a jar, and the sheer comedy of wishing a brain “happy birthday” underscores that they’re attempting to force a family where no bonds of affection exist. By contrast, Miette and One are thrust together by circumstance but clearly remain together out of genuine affection. Miette may protest that she is only helping out One in the way someone might take pity on a lost puppy, but it’s clear from the way she repeatedly returns to his side that he means more to her. In truth, nearly everyone in the city is a lost child. Krank is lost because he feels betrayed by his scientist “father’s” inability to make him a fully-functioning creation, capable of dreaming and imagination. The clones are lost because they feel like echoes of a man they hardly understand, each believing, erroneously, that one of them may in fact be “the original” and thus somehow superior. Poor One is lost without Denrée, seeing himself solely in the role of caregiver, and deprived, suddenly, of anyone to care for. And Miette has been robbed of her childhood by The Octopus, raised without affection and love, and no sense of physical or emotional security. Without spoiling the movie’s final climax, the confrontation between Krank, the petulant child in an adult’s body, and Miette, the adult in a child’s body, is strikingly presented with no dialogue whatsoever. The visuals brilliantly communicate the way in which a child whose youth was stolen away from her uses that theft to strike back and win her way back to her chosen family. That term—“chosen family”—is frequently used in circles of vulnerable people who have otherwise been deprived of the safety and security of supportive, loving family members. In the case of The City of Lost Children, those crucial bonds are forged, and the lost are found again in the most unlikely of circumstances, in the most unlikely of pairings: “Miette, et One. Ensemble.” Together.[end-mark] The post <i>The City of Lost Children</i>: A Surreal French Fairy Tale for the Ages appeared first on Reactor.