Vague Visages’ The Most Precious of Cargoes review contains minor spoilers. Michel Hazanavicius’ 2024 movie features Dominique Blanc, Grégory Gadebois and Denis Podalydès. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

It’s crucial that children remain educated about the Holocaust, although in recent pop culture, there have been very few child-friendly texts which have managed to educate without resorting to exploitation. The 2006 novel The Boy In The Striped Pajamas — and its 2008 film adaptation — is amongst the most commonly invoked in school curriculums, and by far the most problematic, with authorities such as the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum criticizing its accuracy and the way it minimizes the perspectives of those who died in the camps. Taika Waititi’s deplorable Jojo Rabbit (2019) similarly views the atrocities through the magical realist lens of a naive Hitler Youth soldier, falling into the same trap of sidelining those who were mass murdered due to its blinkered perspective. Any child forced to sit through that self-proclaimed “anti-war satire” would likely leave as ill-informed as they were going in.

The latest film from the Academy Award-winner you definitely forgot existed, Michel Hazanavicius, is similarly a heightened fantasy which uses a quasi-fairytale framework to educate a young generation about the Holocaust. The generally negative reception The Most Precious of Cargoes received following its premiere in the 2024 Cannes competition led me to naturally assume it suffered from the same problem as those works outlined above; another case where the heightened, fantastical nature of its storytelling undermined the chance of children learning about the severity of the crimes against humanity unfolding in the background. It has several issues, but this is not one of the problems the animated feature could be diagnosed with, as it grapples with the enormity of its historical backdrop  — and the way stories about it continue to be told — even as it stylizes itself as a dark fable in the mold of the Brothers Grimm.

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The Most Precious of Cargoes is a film for older children, however, and perhaps not the cleanest entry point for parents and teachers wanting to educate. Like the above works, the protagonists are neither Jewish nor from another marginalized group targeted by the Nazis. They are instead two fairytale archetypes living in a cabin in the woods deep in an unspecified snowy wilderness — a woodcutter named Pauvre Bûcheron  (voiced by Grégory Gadebois) and his wife (Dominique Blanc as Pauvre Bûcheronne), who has been unable to bear children. Now too old to be a mother, her salvation comes in the form of a baby she finds in the snow next to the train tracks, but her husband wants her to return this “precious cargo” to the authorities. She was thrown from a train, meaning that — in Pauvre Bûcheron’s eyes — he’s part of a “heartless” race of people. That the story develops in a dramatically obvious way, the woodcutter stepping up to be a protector of the child in the face of antisemitism in his remote village, would elicit eye-rolls no matter how well-intentioned if it were the only focal point of Hazanavicius’s film. However, what separates The Most Precious of Cargoes from similar Holocaust stories aimed at children — which explore their horrors at a distinct remove, from an outsider’s perspective — is that the filmmaker has little interest in maintaining the relative comfort of that distance.

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Without jumping ahead and spoiling the closing narration, lifted directly from the 2019 source novel by Jean-Claude Grumberg, Hazanavicius weaponizes the deliberately distancing effect of magical realism to make a statement about Holocaust denial and how insufficient education can only breed further horrors. There’s an understanding that to set a mystical fable against a backdrop which minimizes the devastation — going so far to use euphemistic terms such as “heartless” for Jewish people, to render the story historically non-specific — is inherently tasteless, and he boldly follows the example set by Grumberg to suggest that shrouding this moment of history in childlike fantasy creates a further distance from understanding, even believing in, the full historical weight of it. The film’s second half takes viewers back to the train carriage headed to the concentration camps, showing the baby’s father growing older and frail in a stark, largely dialogue-free stretch which lasts until the camp is liberated. It’s here where the magical realism gets knotty, and the events in the woods which precede it can be better understood as a father’s fantasy — albeit with the grim understanding that acceptance was still a hurdle in this period — of his child finding a new home, his daydreams using the cliched storytelling beats as something approaching a comfort blanket.

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Despite Alexandre Desplat’s score tugging on the heartstrings, The Most Precious of Cargoes tries to refrain from overbearing sentimentality where possible. If anything, it’s the antithesis of something like Life Is Beautiful (1997), another story where a parent tries to hide the looming death that came with living in a concentration camp from his young son, coining an elaborate fantasy which many viewers found tasteless. The Most Precious of Cargoes could be interpreted as being about the limitations and flaws of resigning yourself to fantastical hope, revealing itself to be a far more intelligent work than on first glance. To write it off as another misjudged Holocaust fantasy tale in the vein of the others mentioned would be to overlook the subtle ways Hazanavicius attempts to interrogate the genre as a whole. The Most Precious of Cargoes may be illuminating for younger viewers at face value for how it doesn’t shy away from the horrors of war from a survivor’s perspective, but if older audiences can brush off their allergy to this oft-misguided brand of storytelling, they may find more food for thought than they bargained for.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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