Vincent Cassel has traded the bell tower for a chisel. Netflix released the official trailer for The Hunchback, Soul of Paris on October 30, and the premise should pull any Gothic devotee a little closer to the screen. Cassel’s Quasimodo is a stonemason, and the authorities chasing him don’t want him locked up. They want to experiment on him.
Jean-François Richet directs, with Karim Leklou, Benjamin Voisin, and Daphné Patakia in the supporting cast. We got our first look at Cassel in the role back in September. Now the story around him is coming into focus.
The year is 1830. Cholera threatens Paris while revolutionary unrest simmers in the streets. Netflix’s synopsis drops Quasimodo right into the middle of it, hunted for medical experiments and caught between political turmoil and an impossible love. Disease and barricades at the same time. Paris has had better years.
This is a reimagining of Victor Hugo’s character, not a faithful trip through the novel. If your mental picture of Quasimodo still involves chatty gargoyles and a singalong in the rafters, adjust accordingly. Richet seems far more interested in a hunted man whose body makes him valuable to people who see him as less than human.
That’s where our corner of the genre should be paying attention. Netflix calls the film a period drama, and there’s no reason to pretend it’s secretly a slasher. But a disfigured man treated as a specimen in a city braced for disease is Gothic to the bone. The medical experimentation alone gives the premise an unsettling edge.
The Hunchback, Soul of Paris premieres on Netflix November 27, 2026.
