A criminal defence lawyer collapses from an overdose in the middle of a courtroom argument, in front of the court he is supposed to command. That is where The Good Lawyer begins: a French legal thriller from Netflix in which Laurent Lafitte plays Léonard Landry, a flamboyant defence attorney who comes out of rehab with one week to save his career and prepare for his own trial. The film reunites Lafitte with director Tristan Séguéla, who cast him as Bernard Tapie in the Netflix series Class Act.

Help comes from the person with the least standing in the building. Noé, a tenacious intern played by Anthony Bajon, is the only one at Landry’s side, and the official festival synopsis describes the arrangement as reluctant. Mélanie Laurent and Carole Bouquet complete the main cast as Iris Saint Didier and Anne Lamarck. The press material does not say who those two women are to Landry, and this preview will not guess.

A defence lawyer on both sides of the bar

The week Landry gets is not only about his own case. French press reports relayed by What’s on Netflix say he has also been handed the trial of a lifetime: the defence of a powerful industrial group accused of complicity with a terrorist network operating in Africa. The same reports describe him as a brilliant criminal lawyer with a cocaine addiction, living a double life until the collapse in court made it public.

That gives the premise a doubled shape. A corporation stands accused of what it enabled at a distance; the man paid to argue its innocence is preparing his own defence at the same time, with no margin for a relapse. The synopsis does not specify what Landry himself is charged with, and that gap matters. Read from the outside, the setup suggests a film more interested in pressure than in procedure: the official Venice text promises “a frantic race involving legal manoeuvres, temptations and dramatic twists”, which puts temptation on the same line as the legal strategy.

It is a familiar trick of the genre turned around. Courtroom thrillers usually ask whether the defendant can be believed. Here the question shifts to whether the defender can be trusted with anyone’s fate, including his own, when every hour of the week is also an hour of staying clean. The film’s working title during production was Clean, which says plainly where its makers thought the weight sat.

Séguéla’s answer to The Fire Within

In his director’s statement for Venice, Séguéla places the film in a specific French lineage. “When Léonard gets out of rehab, his fate hangs by a thread, a thread so thin that every moment of his life feels like a suspenseful cliffhanger,” he writes, before asking: “How will he avoid falling back into his old ways? How will he resist temptation?” The addiction films he loves, he adds, “more often feature outlaws or outcasts than flamboyant lawyers”.

His reference point is Louis Malle’s The Fire Within, the 1963 film about Alain, a man just out of an addiction cure who does not find a way back. Léonard, Séguéla writes, is one of those protagonists who grapple with their demons. The difference is that, unlike Alain, “he is lucky enough to cross paths with a promising good lawyer”.

That sentence quietly reframes the title. In the director’s own phrasing, the good lawyer is not necessarily the star in the robe; it may be the newcomer who agrees to stand next to him. Whether the film keeps that ambiguity open is something only the finished work can answer, but the statement suggests the title is less a description of Landry than a question about which of the two men has earned it.

The Class Act reunion, and a casting echo

Séguéla and Lafitte last worked together on Class Act, the Netflix miniseries in which Lafitte played the businessman and politician Bernard Tapie, a role that brought him an International Emmy nomination for best actor. Since then Lafitte has won the César for best actor for The Richest Woman in the World, Thierry Klifa’s film loosely based on the Bettencourt affair, and appeared in The Count of Monte Cristo, which What’s on Netflix credits with nine million admissions. He is a former member of the Comédie-Française and served as master of ceremonies at the Cannes Film Festival. Séguéla came to this project after Mercato, a football drama.

The casting of Bajon carries its own echo. His breakout was The Prayer, Cédric Kahn’s drama about a young drug addict who goes into rehab in a Catholic recovery community, a role that won him the Silver Bear for best actor in Berlin. In The Good Lawyer he is on the other side of that story: the sober one, the junior, the person asked to hold someone else up. Mélanie Laurent, known internationally for Inglourious Basterds, and Carole Bouquet, a Bond actress in For Your Eyes Only, give the cast two more names audiences outside France will recognise.

Why Netflix took a French thriller to Venice

Netflix’s French originals usually go straight to the service. This one took a detour. Under the title Un bon avocat it premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, in the Venice Open section, which What’s on Netflix called a rare international festival showcase for one of the platform’s French films. Sortir à Paris notes that no nationwide theatrical release has been announced in France, so the festival screening was the film’s only public outing before it lands on the service.

The production comes from Iconoclast, with Simon Jacquet producing; Jacquet also co-wrote the screenplay with Séguéla, Marcia Romano and Stéphane Sebag. The crew includes cinematographer Augustin Barbaroux, editor Pierre Deschamps and composer Amine Bouhafa. Shooting wrapped earlier this year. Sending a local-language genre film to the Lido rather than simply adding it to the catalogue suggests Netflix wants it read as a director’s film with a star at its centre, the same positioning that served Class Act.

None of that settles the question the premise opens and the title repeats. A defence lawyer’s craft is making a court doubt. For one week, the doubt is about him, and the person who has to believe in him is an intern with nothing to gain. Whether a man like Landry can be defended by someone else, or can still defend anyone at all, is the part of the story no synopsis can answer.

The Good Lawyer: release date, cast and runtime

The Good Lawyer (original title Un bon avocat) premieres on Netflix on 9 November 2026. It is a feature film, not a series, running 114 minutes in French, and Netflix rates it 16+. It was first screened at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival in September.

Directed by Tristan Séguéla from a screenplay by Marcia Romano, Simon Jacquet, Tristan Séguéla and Stéphane Sebag. Cast: Laurent Lafitte as Léonard Landry, Anthony Bajon as Noé, Mélanie Laurent as Iris Saint Didier and Carole Bouquet as Anne Lamarck. Produced by Iconoclast.