Sitges 2025: A New Version of ‘The Shrinking Man’ with Jean Dujardin
by Alex Billington
October 17, 2025
“I am the sum of my experiences; the shrinking has merely stripped away certain superficialities.” There’s a brand new cinematic adaptation of the classic horror story The Incredible Shrinking Man ready for viewing. But not many people have heard about it yet, since it’s a European project and it just premiered at the 2025 Sitges Film Festival. This French / Belgian movie is officially titled L’homme qui rétrécit, which translates simply to The Shrinking Man. This fresh, clean new version has opted not to use the additional “incredible” adjective – immortalized by the iconic 1957 sci-fi horror classic The Incredible Shrinking Man film, directed by Jack Arnold, and starring Grant Williams. This adaptation, based on Richard Matheson’s original 1956 novel, The Shrinking Man, stars the always watchable Jean Dujardin as Paul, a shipbuilder who begins to slowly get smaller and smaller. It’s a peculiar yet fascinating movie that doesn’t live up to its potential, but is an intriguing, mostly entertaining watch nonetheless. If anything, it feels like a streaming movie more than a theatrical epic, but there’s still a few engaging scenes and Dujardin is fantastic as always.
This new version of The Shrinking Man is directed by Dutch filmmaker Jan Kounen (of Renegade, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, Vape Wave), from a screenplay written by Christophe Deslandes & Jan Kounen. Aside from setting it in a house on the beach and altering the lead character’s profession to shipbuilding, it’s pretty much exactly as the original novel describes. “Once an unremarkable husband and father, [Paul] finds himself shrinking with no end in sight… His wife and family turn into unreachable giants, the family cat becomes a predatory menace, and [Paul] must struggle to survive in a world that seems to be growing ever larger and more perilous – until he faces the ultimate limits of fear and existence.” Jean Dujardin plays Paul – at first he’s as unremarkable as this book describes, but really stands out once he becomes emotional & expressive when he becomes tiny. An anomaly while swimming is what begins his shrinking process. While he has a wife (played by Marie-Josée Croze) and a young daughter, the film quickly becomes a one-man-show once he starts getting smaller & smaller. When the cat accidentally gets inside the house, he flees into the basement and ends up stuck down there. The film shifts into survival mode and becomes something else.
Also directly from the novel – the big bad villain in the movie is a freaky spider that starts hunting him once he sets up camp in the basement. The intriguing twist in this one is that the spider is an unkillable force, not something he must defeat but rather must overcome in life. Again, this is perfectly described in the original Matheson book: “It was more than a spider. It was every unknown terror in the world fused into wriggling, poison-jawed horror. It was every anxiety, insecurity, and fear in his life given a hideous, night-black form.” Early on in the movie, Paul tells his daughter that he won’t kill the spider (while a regular size man) because they’re good, they’re useful, they have a purpose and there’s no need to get rid of it. Yet later this creature comes back to taunt and torture him. Of course, the whole point of this story is to teach everyone about the power of perspective & relativity. Human beings are used to being a certain size. If that size changes, we will experience the world completely differently. And now cinema allows us to have a much more visceral experience bringing this story to life with a real human being. The sets and VFX work are legit – they make this story way more believable than any of the Ant-Man movies or any other shrinking man stories recently.
That said, this version The Shrinking Man also still feels like it’s lacking. The script runs out of steam in the third act, the ending is non-existent, there’s not much more to it than bare-bones storytelling with a terrific lead performance. It’s another “rough around the edges” movie but in this case that makes it almost boring at times. Even though this kind of movie should never be boring… It’s also not really a horror movie at all, and not really sci-fi either. This movie has a very clean aesthetic & feels more like a strange French combo of Honey I Shrunk the Kids meets Cast Away meets The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The entire middle segment when he figures out how to survive on his own as a tiny being in this basement is reminiscent of the kooky survival scenes in Cast Away. The story about his shrinking has the same mysterious, unexplainable, yet still alluring vibes as Fincher’s underrated adaptation of Benjamin Button – and this film also ends as abruptly as that. I really wish there was more to it, because I enjoyed so much of it, alas it never achieves the greatness it’s clearly aiming for as a modern take on this classic story. Nonetheless it is a fascinating story of overcoming your greatest fears and struggling to survive in a hostile world – still a valuable lesson for us all.
Alex’s Sitges 2025 Rating: 6.5 out of 10
Follow Alex on Twitter – @firstshowing / Or Letterboxd – @firstshowing
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