A young American journalist (Margaret Qualley) stranded in present-day Nicaragua falls for an enigmatic Englishman (Joe Alwyn) who seems like her best chance of escape. She soon realizes, though, that he may be in even greater danger than she is. Adapted from Denis Johnson’s novel.

“Updating Denis Johnson’s Nicaragua-set novel from the Revolution to the present-day and working in English and Spanish, French auteur Claire Denis is venturing into Graham Greene territory here—espionage and dirty deeds in the tropics. It’s worth remembering that she herself grew up in French colonial West Africa; westerners getting hot and bothered in foreign climes pop up in Beau Travail, White Material, L’intrus, and her first film, Chocolat.

The focus here is on a young American, Trish (Margaret Qualley), a freelance journalist who has gotten in over her head and whose passport has been seized after she embarrassed the authorities. Marooned indefinitely in an unnamed Managua, Trish is forced to trade sex for protection and rum money. She tries to put on a tough and cynical front, but secretly she’s desperate. Then she meets Daniel (Joe Alwyn), a dashing English businessman. At first, she thinks he could be her ticket out of here. Gradually she realizes he’s in worse trouble than she is.

Too languid and languorous to be described as a thriller, but more plot-driven than most Denis films, Stars at Noon is a moody, almost malevolent romance, a tropical neo-noir; love and disillusion in the time of COVID.” (VIFF.org)

“Denis revels in the emotional clichés of tropical climates and settings, and her callow protagonists, with their hardboiled mannerisms, are blank slates for international power plays.” (New Yorker)

“In Claire Denis’s film, sex is the great equalizer, or at least the act that allows people to defer taking a firm moral or ethical stance.” (Slant Magazine)

“Like so many of Denis’ films, the incandescent Stars at Noon is cut with such jagged atemporality that it often seems set in a space between time, where the past never happened and the future may never come.” (IndieWire)

“Denis has crafted a film that syncs your heartbeat to its own intoxicating rhythms: a full-body immersion in uneasy pleasures”  (Daily Telegraph)

STARS AT NOON (Clair In present-day Nicaragua, a headstrong American journalist and a mysterious English businessman strike up a romance as they become embroiled in a dangerous labyrinth of lies and conspiracies and are forced to try and escape the country.