Netflix's Streaming Giant Action Thriller Gets Even More Popular After 1 Year

Ad Vitam, released in 2025 and directed by Rodolphe Lauga, has climbed into Netflix’s Top 10 Most Popular Non-English Movies of all time globally, amassing 63,100,000 views and 103,000,000 hours viewed. It now sits among hits like Under Paris, The Platform, Exterritorial and Troll.

The film follows Franck Lazarev (Guillaume Canet), a retired operative from France’s elite counter-terrorism unit GIGN whose life is shattered when masked mercenaries invade his home, kidnap his heavily pregnant wife and frame him for a colleague’s murder. Desperate and angry, he both escapes his foes and hunts them down, while a flashback reveals his wife was also a GIGN operative and the French government is somehow involved.

Critics were largely unimpressed, leaving Ad Vitam with a 38% score on Rotten Tomatoes; many reviews praise the well-choreographed action and visuals but criticize wooden characterization, a jumbled narrative and toe-curling dialogue, and suggest the director missed the mark on portraying a real GIGN operative.

France

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