Sundance Review: ‘Two Women’ is an Entertaining Showcase of Two Great Leads

Sundance Review: ‘Two Women’ is an Entertaining Showcase of Two Great Leads
Laurence Leboeuf and Karine Gonthier-Hyndman appear in Two Women by Chloé Robichaud, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Sara Mishara

Society has different expectations for men and women, due in large part to millennia of patriarchal systems where women were typically responsible for staying home to take care of the children. In a modern world, mothers can work after giving birth and function similarly to men, but there are still maternal connections that they’ll make and will occupy their time, like breastfeeding, that just can’t apply the same way to men even in the most equitable of relationships. Two Women takes a humorous look at this concept in its spotlight of two female neighbors who realize that their male partners are no longer sexually interested in them and take matters into their own hands to satisfy themselves.

Violette (Laurence Leboeuf) is hearing a noise from her bedroom wall that sounds like a crow, but she thinks it’s actually her neighbor having sex. Florence (Karine Gonthier-Hyndman) insists this can’t be true since she and her partner David (Mani Soleymanlou) haven’t had sex in at least a year, and he’s even started taking her antidepressants after she stops so that he won’t have any sex drive. Violette is at home taking care of her newborn baby while her husband Benoit (Félix Moati) travels constantly for work, though, unbeknownst to her, much of that time is spent sleeping with his coworker Éli (Juliette Gariépy). A visit by a cable technician to Florence’s home soon turns into both women calling up for real and inverted problems so that they can find men who actually want them and have a chance to relieve some much-needed pressure.

This is an extremely entertaining film from start to finish. We don’t get to see much of these two women outside of their homes, but it’s great fun to watch as they travel down similar paths, only revealing pieces of what they’re doing to each other. The nature of how they clue their visiting contractors in to what they want is always funny, and the excitement and release seen on their faces as they engage with their newest unsuspecting sexual partner is always very potently felt. The men are incredibly clueless but also get their own subplots, like another neighbor (Sophie Nélisse) who only supports David’s plans for their community because she has an obvious crush on him, and Benoit learning multiple pieces of important news about his wife from Éli, who apparently visits her public Facebook page much more than he does.

This film, from director Chloé Robichaud and screenwriter Catherine Léger, a remake of Claude Fournier’s 1970 film Two Women in Gold and will understandably be subject to comparisons. But this film stands on its own as an impressively timeless entry that does include cell phones and other modernities but whose events don’t revolve around technology. These women could feel this way and these men could be just as useless in any era, and the film uses a muted color palette that matches the way these women aren’t able to put themselves first and then finally start doing it. It’s also not a film that’s based around twists or the perilous nature of secret affairs, instead more focused on how partners often fail to communicate and don’t even realize how much of a problem there until it’s too late to easily remedy it.

This film boasts wonderful performance all around, with the men poking fun at themselves in a way that doesn’t feel overly demeaning, showing that they could be capable of goodness if only they put in the tiniest amount of effort. Gariépy puts a clever twist on the “other woman” as Éli constantly brings up Violette to Benoit, far more in tune with her than her own husband is. Leboeuf and Gonthier-Hyndman are both fantastic, ensuring that their characters are different enough but still warmly entertaining and not too over-the-top to represent what many who have never had the chance to properly express themselves might dream of but likely not actually act on in this film, which is a very memorable delight.

Grade: B+

Check out more of Abe Friedtanzer’s articles.

Two Women makes its world premiere in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

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