Alter Ego — Characters & Cast

To prove — first to Nathalie, then to the street, finally to himself — that he is not the inferior copy. Underneath, simply to be looked at the way people look at Axel.

Begins as a settled, slightly cantankerous suburban husband with a life he had made peace with. The arrival of his double converts that peace into humiliation; irritation becomes fixation, fixation becomes rivalry, and rivalry pushes him to the verge of a nervous breakdown. His trajectory is a steady erosion of the fiction that he was fine.

To settle in and be liked — an ambition so unthreatening that its effortlessness is what wounds Alex most.

Arrives as a serene, apparently flawless neighbour and functions less as a character than as a verdict on Alex. The film progressively tests whether his perfection is substance or surface, and how much of it exists only in Alex's terrified reading of him.

To hold the marriage and her own self-regard together while the man she lives with disintegrates over a neighbour's hairline.

Starts as the exasperated, clear-eyed counterweight to her husband's moods and ends up implicated in the same comparison machine: confronted with Axel and his household, her own flaws and dissatisfactions surface. Director Nicolas Charlet described her as "brilliant," bringing a unique energy, noting that her character also reveals its own flaws when facing Axel.

To live the pleasant life she appears to have; her calm is precisely what the Floutard household cannot manage.

Introduced as the finishing touch on Axel's enviable life — magnificent, poised, the visible proof of his success — she becomes another surface onto which Alex projects everything he believes he has been denied.