A newspaper becomes dangerous long before anyone reads it. Its authority begins with repetition: the masthead people recognize, the vendor they pass every morning, the typography that signals legitimacy, the ritual of unfolding pages whose existence seems to certify their own truth. Le Faux Soir understands this material side of propaganda with unusual clarity. Michaël R. Roskam’s film turns a remarkable act of Belgian Resistance into a wartime heist, yet its real subject is the infrastructure that allows one version of reality to appear official.
Occupied Brussels in 1943 has already provided the demonstration. Le Soir, once an established national newspaper, has been converted into a vehicle for Nazi propaganda, and its familiar presence on the newsstand grants that propaganda a legitimacy that underground publications cannot easily challenge.
Marc Aubrion (Arieh Worthalter), an anarchist poet with an instinct for provocation, begins his resistance on a much smaller scale, producing crude anti-Nazi verses and hiding them inside library books. The gesture is funny, reckless and politically sincere. It also reaches almost nobody. His encounter with the organized Resistance changes the scale of the problem. Marc needs access to readers who have no intention of seeking those words out.
That distinction gives Le Faux Soir its sharpest idea. The plan to counterfeit an issue of Le Soir does not attempt to persuade readers through superior argument alone. It hijacks the habits through which authority circulates. The Resistance wants the same nameplate, the same appearance, the same routes to the same newsstands, with satire and anti-Nazi material replacing collaborationist copy inside the familiar shell. Propaganda is confronted through mimicry.
Roskam treats publishing with the seriousness other war films reserve for explosives. Presses, type, paper, storage spaces and delivery schedules become tactical resources. One sequence maps the route from printing press to newsstand with the precision of a robbery plan.
The timing of distribution matters down to a narrow window: the false edition must reach buyers before the official paper without appearing suspiciously early. François Damiens’ printer Wellner regards his machines as weapons, and the film repeatedly validates that language by showing how much danger can be concentrated inside rollers, blocks of type and stacks of paper.
This attention to process gives the film a distinctive political texture. Resistance here is labor. It requires people who can write, print, organize, transport, improvise and keep quiet. Françoise, played by Mélanie Thierry, commands an operation whose effectiveness depends on many participants performing highly specific tasks, often without the individual heroism that wartime cinema prefers to foreground. Collective action is less photogenic than martyrdom, so Roskam makes the machinery photogenic instead.
The humor performs a similar act of redistribution. Marc’s insults, conversations about Hitler’s appearance and the absurdities created by clandestine organization refuse the solemn vocabulary through which fascism prefers to imagine itself. Mockery becomes a political method. The counterfeit newspaper is satirical, so the film’s comic register belongs to the operation rather than floating above it as audience relief.
Roskam is careful, too, about where that comedy stops. A scene in Geraldine’s classroom, where Nazis remove a Jewish girl while authority figures discuss Jews hiding in plain sight, restores the violence behind every joke. The proximity matters. Fascism can be ridiculous and murderous in the same afternoon. Treating those qualities as incompatible would grant it an undeserved coherence.
Christophe Chassol’s score works especially well when Roskam needs administrative labor to acquire rhythm. Françoise reading copy while the music follows her cadence turns editorial work into something almost performative. Elsewhere, the pounding and arrangement of type begin to function like percussion. Tracking shots, zooms and a conspicuously stylish slow-motion walk push the operation toward caper territory, occasionally with such enthusiasm that the film seems delighted to discover that printing can have swagger. The problem is that swagger cannot entirely solve repetition.
At 133 minutes, the planning structure begins to expose its limits. The film repeatedly introduces a logistical problem, sends the group scrambling toward a solution, restores the operation, then produces another obstacle. Early on, that accumulation strengthens the premise because every complication reveals another piece of hidden infrastructure behind a newspaper. Later, several obstacles perform nearly identical dramatic work. The 22-day countdown promises acceleration, yet parts of the middle remain locked into the rhythm of administrative correction.
This is an important distinction because the procedural detail itself is not the mistake. Compressing the printing process into a triumphant montage would erase much of what makes Le Faux Soir politically interesting. The weakness lies in Roskam’s reluctance to decide which problems deserve full dramatic weight. Historical fidelity can preserve every hurdle; drama has to rank them.
The ensemble pays a similar price. Many characters are defined primarily through their function in the operation, and the later account of who survived, who died and what the mission cost sometimes carries emotional information the preceding drama has only partially earned. Worthalter escapes that problem because Marc enters with a clearly established conflict between individual defiance and collective discipline. Geraldine’s wish that he remain alive clashes with his contempt for passivity, giving his bravado a personal consequence before the larger plan absorbs him.
What makes the film culturally significant, though, is its refusal to treat propaganda as a battle settled by writing the better sentence. The underground already possesses truthful information. What it lacks is distribution, familiarity and the institutional costume that persuades ordinary citizens to accept one publication as legitimate before reading a word.
That idea gives the historical episode obvious contemporary relevance, though the film’s faith in truth occasionally becomes too reassuring. Reaching a misled audience does not guarantee conversion. Readers bring fear, loyalty, resentment, habit and identity to every page placed before them. Information can breach a silo without dissolving it.
The operation remains powerful for a narrower reason. For one edition, the Resistance seizes the occupier’s own channel and makes authority contradict itself. The familiar paper arrives where it always arrives, wearing the face readers expect, and then begins to laugh at the regime that believed it controlled the page. Le Faux Soir is strongest when it stays close to that act of sabotage: truth built into the machinery required to place it where power had decided it no longer belonged.
Le Faux Soir had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 11, 2026. Set in November 1943 during the German occupation of Belgium, the historical drama details the daring underground resistance operation that published a satirical spoof of the nation’s primary propaganda newspaper.
Full Credits
Title: Le Faux Soir
Distributor: Cineart, Goodfellas
Release date: September 11, 2026 (Toronto International Film Festival)
Running time: 2 hours 13 minutes (133 minutes)
Director: Michaël R. Roskam
Writers: Bernard Falaise, Domenico La Porta, Michaël R. Roskam
Producers and Executive Producers: Frakas Productions, Groupe Rossel, Rectangle Productions, Goodfellas, Harbor Men Pictures
Cast: Arieh Worthalter, François Damiens, Bouli Lanners, Mélanie Thierry, Mara Taquin, Karim Leklou, Peter Van Den Begin, Alexis Manenti
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Jordan Vanschel
Editors: Nelly Quettier
Composer: Chassol
The Review
Le Faux Soir
Le Faux Soir finds unusual dramatic force in presses, paper routes and editorial labor, turning a Belgian Resistance operation into a sharp study of how authority reaches an audience. Michaël R. Roskam’s procedural devotion occasionally slows the film, and much of the ensemble remains defined by function. Yet its humor, material detail and distrust of propaganda give the historical story real bite. Its strongest insight is simple: controlling information means controlling the machinery that delivers it.
PROS
- Distinctive publishing-as-heist structure
- Sharp use of satire against fascist authority
- Strong procedural and historical detail
- Chassol’s score energizes editorial labor
- Worthalter gives Marc a clear dramatic center
CONS
- The 133-minute runtime strains momentum
- Repeated logistical setbacks lose force
- Several supporting characters remain thin
