Diane in the Loop: A Daughter's Anger, a Mother's Silence
Updated: Sep 6
83RD VENICE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2026 REVIEW:
Directed by: Ann Sirot, Raphaël Balboni | 2026 | Belgium, France | 92 min
-Shahran Morshed
What would you do if you suddenly discovered that something terrible had happened to your mother before you were even born? For Diane, the answer is immediate. Her mother was raped three years before Diane's birth, and once she learns this, she becomes obsessed with the idea of revenge. But there is a problem: her mother does not want revenge. She does not even want to keep talking about what happened. She has spent years trying to leave it behind.
That simple conflict is where Ann Sirot and Raphaël Balboni's Diane in the Loop finds much of its interest. The film is about trauma, but not quite in the way one might expect. Rather than focusing on the violence itself, it looks at what survives it: the silence, the unanswered questions and the strange ways a painful past can reach someone who was never there.
Diane has no personal memory of what happened to her mother. Yet the moment she learns the truth, she feels compelled to do something about it. Her mother's suffering suddenly becomes a part of her own emotional landscape. She wants to understand what happened, but more importantly, she wants to give it an ending. If her mother never received justice, Diane believes she can provide it.
Her mother sees things very differently. She has already found her own way of living with the past, and that means refusing to let it define the rest of her life. For Diane, this is almost impossible to accept. How can someone simply move forward after something so terrible? And if no one seeks justice, does that mean what happened has been forgotten?
The film's most compelling tension comes from this disagreement.
Diane believes she is doing something for her mother, while her mother seems to be asking for the opposite: to be left alone with a past she has already learned to live beyond. In trying to protect her mother, Diane risks taking away her right to decide what healing means for herself.
This also complicates Diane's relationship with men. She both desires them and seems deeply suspicious of them, carrying attraction, anger and distrust at once. The film wisely avoids turning this into a simple psychological explanation of her sexuality. Diane remains contradictory, and that contradiction makes her feel like a person rather than a symbol. She is trying to work out which parts of herself belong to her and which might have been shaped by a history she never knew.
What makes the film particularly unusual is the way it turns this intimate family conflict into something resembling a revenge western. Diane becomes a woman on a mission, looking for someone she believes must pay for what he did. There is something deliberately strange, even funny, about placing such a painful subject inside the framework of a genre usually built around clear enemies and satisfying confrontations.
But there is no satisfying revenge waiting for Diane. The closer she gets to the idea of punishment, the more complicated it becomes. Nothing she does can return the years her mother lost or erase what happened. The film gradually shifts the question from How can Diane avenge her mother? to something much more difficult: Does her mother even want to be avenged?
This is where the film's ideas about memory and forgetting become important. Diane sees forgetting as almost another form of injustice. Her mother sees moving forward as a form of freedom. Neither perspective is dismissed. The film understands that remembering can be necessary, but it also understands that a person should not have to spend their entire life remembering the worst thing that ever happened to them.
I particularly like that the mother is never reduced to a victim waiting to be rescued. She has her own desires, her own understanding of the past and, most importantly, her own agency. Diane's intentions may come from love, but love does not always mean knowing what is best for someone else.
Sirot and Balboni's approach is not always completely successful. The film moves freely between drama, comedy, absurdity and the language of the western, and some of these tonal shifts can feel abrupt. There are also moments when the film seems to have more ideas than it has time to fully explore. Still, its willingness to take these risks is part of its appeal.
Diane in the Loop is not a masterpiece, but it is a genuinely good film with a lot of potential. More importantly, it is difficult to mistake it for something we've seen many times before. Its most interesting achievement is turning a story about sexual violence into a story about what happens when the trauma of one generation becomes the emotional inheritance of another.
Diane begins by believing that she has to carry her mother's pain for her. What she slowly discovers is that perhaps the greatest act of love is not carrying someone else's wound forever, but allowing them to decide when they are ready to put it down.
Shahran Morshed / Poet, Filmmaker & Critic
Founder and director of F for Films
Founder and chief-editor of Basically Cinema
Contact : shahran.sp@gmail.com
F for Films : filmsffor@gmail.com
Basically Cinema : basicallycinema@gmail.com
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