Trailer, via My French Stories.
Key facts
- Title: The Last Patient
- Year: 2026
- Director: Rémi Bassaler
- Writers: Rémi Bassaler, Marion Defer
- Genre: Drama
- Cast: Anouk Grinberg as Judith; Luàna Bajrami as Aïda; Félix Lefebvre; Achille Reggiani; Rabah Nait Oufella
- Score: 7 of 10
Judith is a suburban doctor on the eve of her retirement. She opens her practice door to Aïda, a woman eight months pregnant who has fallen out of the medical care system. Judith agrees to take her in. What follows is one night that puts every conviction she holds as a healthcare professional to the test.
That is the premise of The Last Patient, the 2026 drama directed by Rémi Bassaler and written by Bassaler with Marion Defer. The film is built on a narrow frame — one doctor, one patient, one night — and it asks whether a system pushed to its breaking point can still hold a single person inside it.
Anouk Grinberg plays Judith. Luàna Bajrami plays Aïda. The cast also includes Félix Lefebvre, Achille Reggiani and Rabah Nait Oufella, in roles the available material does not name.
Judith has one foot out the door
The setup is a pressure cooker by design. Judith is not a young idealist. She is a doctor at the end of a career, a woman who has spent years inside a system she already knows can fail. Her decision to take Aïda in is not naïve. It is deliberate.
Bassaler and Defer place the whole film on that decision and what follows. The night is the unit of measurement. Judith’s professional convictions are what the film weighs. It does not spend time arguing that the healthcare system is broken. It assumes that and asks what one person does inside the wreckage.
That is a smart choice for a drama. It keeps the scope tight and the stakes personal. Aïda is eight months pregnant and outside the system. That detail does the work. She is not a hypothetical patient. She is a woman about to give birth with no medical home.
Aïda is already in crisis when she arrives
Luàna Bajrami’s Aïda is the catalyst. She reaches Judith’s practice door already in crisis — pregnant, effectively uninsured, having slipped through the cracks of a system meant to catch her. The title tells you where this is going. Aïda is the last patient Judith will see before she walks away.
The synopsis frames the night as a test of Judith’s convictions as a healthcare professional. That is the film’s engine. It is not a medical procedural. It is a moral drama about what happens when the safety net has holes and the person holding the net is about to let go of it anyway.
Bassaler and Defer do not need to invent a villain. The system is the antagonist. Judith and Aïda are both inside it. One is leaving. One was never properly let in.
The title carries its own argument
The Last Patient is a title that makes a claim. Judith’s final case is not a routine one. It is a woman the system has already abandoned. The film uses that irony as its foundation.
The drama lives there. Not in whether Judith will help — the synopsis says she agrees to take Aïda in — but in what that help costs her and what it reveals about the system she is leaving behind. A retirement story becomes a reckoning story.
The film also benefits from what it does not show. There is no sprawling hospital, no boardroom, no policy debate. There is a practice door, a doctor and a pregnant woman. The scale is human. The stakes are not small.
Anouk Grinberg is the anchor
Anouk Grinberg carries the film as Judith. The role demands a performance that holds both exhaustion and resolve — a woman who has spent a career inside a broken system and is now asked to prove she still believes in it.
Grinberg is the center of gravity. The film depends on whether the audience believes Judith’s choice and its cost. That is a heavy lift, and the casting signals that Bassaler and Defer wanted weight at the middle of the frame, not youth.
Luàna Bajrami’s Aïda is the counterweight. She is not a passive victim. She is a woman who has been failed and who arrives anyway, at the door of a doctor who is about to stop being a doctor. The dynamic between the two is the film’s whole argument.
Félix Lefebvre, Achille Reggiani and Rabah Nait Oufella round out the cast in unnamed roles. The source material does not specify their parts, so what they do across the night is not known from the details available.
What the film is actually about
Strip away the medical setting and The Last Patient is about the moment a person decides whether their principles survive their circumstances. Judith has every reason to turn Aïda away. She is retiring. The system is failing. One more patient will not fix it.
She takes her in anyway. That is the film’s thesis. Not that the system works, but that individuals inside it sometimes still do. Bassaler and Defer are not arguing for policy. They are arguing for the human residue that survives a broken institution.
That makes for a smaller, sharper film than a healthcare exposé. It is also a harder one to pull off. A single night with two people in a room can collapse into stagey talk if the writing is not precise. The premise suggests the film knows its scope and stays inside it.
One night is a high-wire act
The risk here is containment. A film set across one night, in one practice, with two central characters, lives or dies on its dialogue and its performances. There is no subplot to rescue a slow stretch. There is no B-story to cut away to.
That is not a flaw in the concept. It is a demand. The Last Patient has to earn every minute of its night. If the writing holds, the intimacy is an asset. If it does not, the film has nowhere to hide.
The synopsis also leaves the ending open. We know Judith takes Aïda in. We do not know what happens by morning. That ambiguity looks deliberate. The film is not promising a resolution to the healthcare crisis. It is promising a night.
Where this lands
The Last Patient has a clear point of view and a narrow frame. It puts a retiring doctor and an abandoned pregnant woman in the same room and asks what obligation survives when the system does not. That is a real question, and staging it over a single night is the right call.
The cast is strong on paper. Grinberg and Bajrami are the kind of pairing that can carry a two-hander. Bassaler and Defer have built a premise that does not need padding. The film’s restraint is its best quality.
What holds it back from a higher score is the same thing that makes it work: the containment. A single night with two people is a high-wire act, and the ceiling is real. The premise is sharp, the casting is right and the scope is disciplined. That is enough for a solid recommendation, not a rave.
7 of 10.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
