The few bad reviews for Roman Polanski’s superb An Officer and a Spy are dismissible embarrassments; the same goes for the 2020 ruckus from France’s Me Too showfolk who were indignant that Polanski’s César Award for Best Director put art over gender politics. The killjoys deemed an individual case of sexual misconduct more important than how An Officer and a Spy analyzed and weighed the nation’s racism. Polanski’s take on the Alfred Dreyfus Affair in 1894, in which Dreyfus, an army captain, was accused of passing secrets to Germany, convicted, and then eventually acquitted, raises the specter of France’s anti-Jewish bigotry.

That shame was plainly evoked by the film’s original title J’accuse! — after the title of the 1898 open letter that novelist Émile Zola published in Dreyfus’s defense, pointing out France’s disgrace. And while modern, compounded gender politics may explain why it’s taken six years for Polanski’s film to open in the U.S. at New York’s Film Forum, the current Hamas-Israel conflict makes the timing uncanny.

The question of Dreyfus’s guilt or innocence is contrasted with the investigation launched by officer Marie-Georges Picquart (Jean Dujardin), the newly appointed head of the statistical section of the secret service charged with mopping up the Dreyfus Affair but whose military duty forces him to act, almost in contradiction, as both officer and spy.

Although this is a prestige picture set in the past, its period tale also addresses treason — very much a 2025 concern. Polanski (upgrading screenwriter Robert Harris, of the trashy Conclave) uses this history to examine the way a country turns against itself. He emphasizes the ethnic paranoia and social affront that has preoccupied his late career — The Ghost Writer, Carnage, The Pianist — all derived more from his Jewish experience than the usual macabre suspicion he’s known for. This is the social horror that he and we know is real.

Yet it’s not Dreyfus (Louis Garrel) but Picquart who is the film’s major subject. Picquart was Dreyfus’s military professor; he was reflexively disdainful yet committed to fairness, which makes their official and personal face-offs compelling. Dreyfus fell victim to the French army’s bureaucracy, ranking officers who claimed to protect the nation yet acted atrociously according to the prejudices of a dogmatic echelon.

Picquart observes this contradiction through his own conflicts — he’s an ambitious soldier and unattached bachelor involved with the married Madame Monnier (Emmanuelle Siegner). He’s not corrupt, but Dujardin gives him complicated virility in a world that is “in the midst of scandal daily.” (The army spies on, then mocks, a pair of male diplomats.) Dujardin’s imposing figure, darkly handsome profile, and dashing moustache seemed comical in The Artist, but here he’s archetypal. In his flat-top kepi, black jacket with gold braid, and flared red trousers, Picquart personifies his culture’s ambivalence.

A man of honor, Picquart rocks the boat, drawing suspicion upon himself, plus imprisonment similar to Dreyfus’s. Thus his experience — and his heroic profile — exposes the dishonesty of corrupted culture.

In this way An Officer and a Spy also illuminates contemporary concern with national honor. A hierarchy obsessed with “national security” and “democracy” resembles today’s order of bloviators. Their eventual unmasking receives an exhilarating montage like the climax of Costa-Gavras’s Z, except Polanski eschews “anti-fascist” bluster. Polanski’s sensitivity to the crimes of social hypocrisy and the workings of power cast light on Millennial lawfare, which makes the movie unexpectedly urgent. The sepia sequence of Dreyfus on Devil’s Island conveys a pastness distinct from cinematographer Pawel Edelman’s vivid imagery of the ignoble Belle Époque — what could be called classical corruption. Portraits of Dreyfus lying in leg irons while his prosecutor Jean Sandherr (Éric Ruf) dies of syphilis exemplify their destinies. Each shot of Seigner as Picquart’s seductive yet forthright mistress is a candid portrait of the era’s contradictions.

An Officer and a Spy captures the moral oppositions of history and the present. There’s none of the sentimental flamboyance that was in The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Hollywood’s stirring, self-congratulatory treatment of the Dreyfus case, which is appropriate since this era lacks a journalist of Zola’s perception and courage.

Polanski distills that crisis to a duel between Picquart and Hubert-Joseph Henry (Grégory Gadebois), the bullying lieutenant-colonel who forged the letters that condemned Dreyfus. The battle between right and wrong, honor and pride, is perfectly physicalized by Polanski — elegant, yet just bloody enough. It vouchsafes the devastating advice that Picquart hears from the army’s Deputy Chief of Staff Charles-Arthur Gonse (Hervé Pierre): “Taking secrets to the grave is exactly what we do.” Polanski followed J’accuse with his acerbic satire The Palace. Both films are right for these times.