9Vies
2026 · 2m
Directed by Romain Thirion
Genres: drama, fantasy, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Moving between the ages of her life, a mysterious stranger offers the chance to inhabit, one more time, all the selves that were never lived.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise wants to be existential—nine lives, unlived selves, a stranger as ferryman—but it plays it straight, which is exactly the kind of tasteful restraint that makes me suspicious; if you're going to traffic in parallel-lives metaphysics, earn the weirdness or don't bother.
Thirion constructs a formal meditation on temporal selfhood and regret that sits comfortably in the lineage of philosophical sci-fi shorts; the restraint in the staging and the measured pacing suggest a filmmaker thinking carefully about what image language *means*, not just what it shows.
Two minutes is nothing, but the decision to let the stranger remain visually ambiguous—neither guide nor mirror—while the camera lingers on the protagonist's microexpressions across age makes the whole thing click; that's the economy that matters.