There are no words in “Le Réverbère,” and after about five minutes you stop expecting any. The film, which opens in France on Wednesday and in the United States next month under the title “The Lamplighter,” tells its story entirely in images, music, and the hiss of gas, and it tells it so clearly that a 5-year-old and a film critic can follow it with equal ease, which is a rarer achievement than it sounds.
The lamplighter is a boy of perhaps 12, with a ladder and a brass pole, who lights the gas lamps of a hilly, unnamed French city every evening and extinguishes them every dawn. The year is somewhere around 1900. In the opening sequence, which runs 11 minutes and is one of the great passages of animation I have seen, the boy works his way up a street, lamp by lamp, and the city comes alive around him: a window opens, a cat moves, a couple argues, a baker closes. The camera, which is to say the pencil, never leaves the street.
Then the electricians arrive. They are not villains. They are men in bowler hats with coils of wire, and they are polite to the boy, and they are putting him out of work. The film’s middle section follows the slow replacement of the lamps, one street at a time, and the boy’s dawning understanding that the thing he does will soon not be done by anyone. There is a sequence in which he lights a lamp that has already been electrified, out of habit, and stands under it in the hard white glare, and it is heartbreaking without a single close-up.
“Le Réverbère” was made over six years by Atelier Nord, a studio of 30 people in Angoulême, in the southwest of France, on a budget of 9 million euros, about $9.7 million, and it is drawn by hand, in pencil and watercolor, at 12 frames per second. The director, Lucie Martel, 44, has said that she wanted the film to “look like a memory of something that happened before you were born.” It does. The palette is restricted to ochres, slate blues, and the warm orange of the gas flame, and the electric light, when it comes, is drawn in a cold, flat white that does not belong to the same world.
The score, by the Breton composer Yann Le Floch, is performed by a chamber ensemble of nine and does the work of dialogue: a clarinet for the boy, a bassoon for his sleeping grandfather, a rising figure in the strings for the city at dusk. It is never sentimental, which, in a wordless film about obsolescence, is a kind of miracle.
The film’s last 10 minutes, in which the boy finds a new use for his ladder, are not quite as strong as what precedes them, and the ending, though lovely, is a little neat. But this is a small complaint about a film that achieves, in 84 minutes and with no words at all, what most films fail to achieve with a great many.
“Le Réverbère” opens in France on Oct. 15. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Rated for all audiences.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 13 of the European edition with the headline: Review: A Hand-Drawn French Animation About a Lamplighter Lights Up the Dark.
