In Agathe Riedinger’s Wild Diamond, we meet a young woman with a desire so fierce it feels like fire under her skin. Liane (played with haunting intensity by Malou Khebizi) is a teenager on the fringes of French society who yearns for something transcendent. Her aspiration? To become “the French Kim Kardashian.” At first glance, this dream might sound absurd—another social media delusion. But the more time we spend with Liane, the more we realize this isn’t about celebrity in the traditional sense. It’s about being seen. Being loved. Being real.
Liane’s world is a gray canvas. She lives in Fréjus, in a soulless low-income housing project, surrounded by cracked concrete, lifeless canals, and echoes of better lives she watches on her phone. Her own life, by contrast, feels like a punishment. Her mother (Andréa Bescond) floats from one sugar daddy to the next, and Liane is the de facto guardian to her younger sister Alicia (Ashley Romano), a quiet, observant girl still navigating childhood. Liane has no career, no money, no traditional support. What she does have is a smartphone, a few thousand followers, and a dream she clings to like a lifeline.
From its opening frames, Wild Diamond places us squarely in Liane’s universe—and crucially, in her perspective. The camera hardly ever leaves her side, reflecting the way she sees others not as fully formed people but as background noise in her quest for validation. Even though she shows love toward her sister and friends, her emotional bandwidth is consumed by the promise of something grander: fame, attention, the shimmering euphoria of being watched and adored. The online world seduces her with its filtered perfection and metrics of affection—likes, comments, DMs—and she responds with offerings of her own. Photos, videos, selfies. Versions of herself she wants to believe in.
Liane is a master of digital self-curation. She’s had her breasts augmented, her lips filled with hyaluronic acid, and dreams of a Brazilian butt lift. These aren’t cosmetic whims; they’re weapons in her arsenal, tools to mold herself into someone worthy of visibility. Her friends laugh at her ambitions—“influencer” seems a laughable job title—but Liane isn’t joking. She has faith in her trajectory, a feverish belief that she’ll land on Miracle Island, a reality TV show that she believes is her ticket to stardom. When she sends in her audition tape, it feels like a sacred act.
There’s a rawness to Wild Diamond that makes it deeply affecting. This isn’t satire like Ingrid Goes West, which took influencer culture to dark, absurd extremes. Nor is it merely a social critique. Instead, Riedinger offers something more tactile and human. Liane’s longing is palpable. It doesn’t stem from narcissism so much as a hunger for transformation. Her pursuit of fame—fleeting, fragile, ultimately hollow—is the same force that’s driven characters across cinema history. Think Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, desperate to be seen on television not because he wants to tell jokes, but because he needs to exist in the eyes of others. Or Sara Goldfarb in Requiem for a Dream, who imagines a red dress and a diet pill-fueled dream of game show glory. These characters aren’t shallow—they’re starving.
Liane’s story fits in this lineage. Her obsession is born of desperation, yes, but also of brilliance. She’s not stupid. She’s resourceful, determined, self-aware. She knows the odds are stacked against her. She just doesn’t care. She’d rather chase the shimmer than submit to the gray. This tension is where Wild Diamond thrives.
Cinematographer Noé Bach brings a woozy, dreamlike lens to Liane’s world, as though her reality is already half-consumed by fantasy. Her Instagram feed, the glowing screen of her phone, the mirror she stares into with aching hope—all feel more real than the cracked concrete outside her window. The lighting blurs, flares, pulses with electric possibility. In one stunning sequence, Liane enters a nightclub and becomes hypnotized by a girl dancing on a platform. The girl, confident and commanding, seems like an apparition of everything Liane wants to be. She stares, entranced, as if falling upward into the scene before her, surrendering to the allure of another life.
Bach and Riedinger never let us forget that we’re inside Liane’s consciousness. We feel her obsession, her boredom, her bursts of rage when the dream feels too far away. At times, the film meanders, mirroring Liane’s own lack of direction. We follow her through a couple of days in her life, and while there’s little in terms of traditional plot, the visual intensity and Khebizi’s magnetic presence keep us transfixed.
Malou Khebizi is extraordinary. This is her debut, but she performs with the confidence of a veteran. Her Liane is mercurial—tough and fragile, manipulative and sincere, radiant and angry. She oscillates between extremes, as if her emotions have no safety net. There’s a scene where she applies rhinestones to her platform stripper heels. The act is almost ritualistic. Her fingers linger over the glue. The way she positions each gem is reverent. The shoes may be cheap, but in her mind, they become sacred artifacts. This is not just costume; it’s transformation. It’s magic.
The film touches on themes of religion in subtle, provocative ways. Liane often speaks to her followers in quasi-religious language: “I walk with the Lord. I am a soldier. We’ll get revenge!” There’s something fanatical in her tone, a warped sense of martyrdom. She sees herself as chosen, anointed, called to a higher purpose. It’s a fascinating angle that the film only briefly explores. More could have been done with this intersection of faith and fame—the spiritual void filled by digital adoration. Still, its presence lingers like perfume, making Liane’s actions feel less like ambition and more like prophecy.
What Wild Diamond achieves, above all, is empathy without condescension. It does not mock Liane. It does not judge her. It doesn’t pat her on the head with pity, nor does it glorify her struggle as a triumph of the human spirit. Instead, it observes. It listens. It lets us draw our own conclusions. And in doing so, it becomes something rare.
The film challenges us to consider our own relationship to visibility. In a world where identity is often constructed through pixels and algorithms, where success is measured in followers and engagement rates, what does it mean to be seen? And what does it cost? Liane sacrifices everything for this one goal. She endures mockery, poverty, objectification, and emotional isolation. But the dream remains intact. Even when the comments on her posts are cruel or bizarre, she reads them with a strange mix of pride and detachment. She’s feeding the algorithm with her soul.
Yet, despite everything, Wild Diamond never feels cynical. There’s a strange hope embedded in its final frames. Liane may be chasing a fantasy, but isn’t that what we all do in some form? The rhinestones on her shoes may not be real diamonds, but they shimmer just the same. And to her, that shimmer is the promise of something better. Something radiant.
This ambiguity—this refusal to label Liane’s journey as tragic or triumphant—is what makes Wild Diamond so powerful. It leaves the door open. It invites reflection. It asks: when the world refuses to look at you, how far will you go to make them see?
In the end, Liane’s story is not just about influencer culture, or teenage obsession, or social media addiction. It’s about the human need for significance. For meaning. For connection. And whether we find it through art, religion, performance, or pixels, that search defines us.
Agathe Riedinger’s Wild Diamond is a stunning debut, emotionally rich and visually arresting. It is unflinching in its portrayal of a young woman on the brink—of fame, of madness, of adulthood. And while it doesn’t offer easy answers, it offers something far more valuable: understanding.
Liane may never become the French Kim Kardashian. But for 98 minutes, she is the center of a story that treats her with dignity, curiosity, and depth. That alone is a kind of stardom.
