Going out in search of oneself: the thriller

David Zimmerman, a Parisian photographer who has just broken up with his partner, is dragged by his insistent best friend to a New Year's Eve party. The presence of his ex doesn't bode well for a memorable evening, but he suddenly discovers among the guests the face of a girl he photographed months earlier: mesmerized, he follows her, and without exchanging a word, they make passionate love. The next day, when he wakes up at home, still dazed, he discovers that his body has transformed into that of the girl and that she has disappeared without a trace. In a strange body, terribly confused and frightened, David asks himself many questions. What exactly happened? Who was the girl? How can he get his body back? And, above all, is he still the same person?

Body swapping is a fantastic resource that is often used in fiction with humorous intent, but in comics The David Zimmerman Case (Astiberri, translated by Rubén Lardín), Lucas Harari and his brother Arthur (co-writer of the script) approach it from an uncompromising realism to build a thriller Fast-paced and extraordinarily absorbing. Trapped in a female body, David literally searches for himself in the hope of going back and recovering his body, a desperate search in which each new clue and revelation opens up more disturbing questions. Mystery is always the narrative driving force of a story that stirs the very notion of otherness and the swampy areas of identity, from gender to family heritage, and progressively settles into the territory of existential terror, where the works of authors such as Charles Burns, Shintaro Kago and, occasionally, Daniel

The first two comics by Lucas Harari, the one unpublished in our house The magnet (Sarbacane, 2017) and The last rose of summer (Dolmen, 2022), he was already pointed out as a great revelation of the current French comic, heir to the clean and precise lines of Yves Chaland with a masterful sense of graphic narration and a natural talent for thriller. The David Zimmerman Case It is his darkest and most cinematic work, with a Kafkaesque atmosphere that is visually established through the exclusive use of cold shades of blue and red, a chromatic choice that he already used in The magnet.

With his new work, Harari takes a leap forward and reveals himself as a creator of fascinating nightmares that reinvents a genre as contemporary as body horror. In fact, it's not hard to imagine the potential of this story in the hands of a director like David Cronenberg, who has made the body and identity the center of his cinema. However, it will be the co-writer of the comic, the filmmaker and co-writer of the Oscar-winning script forAnatomy of a Fall Arthur Harari, who will adapt it to film with Léa Seydoux and Niels Schneider in the lead roles.