à la fin…
2020 · 2m
Directed by Nicolas Lichtle
Genres: experimental, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, surreal
A two-and-a-half-minute succession of small poetic, absurd and surreal moments reflecting anxieties about today's world.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 2.5-minute collage of surreal anxiety vignettes that refuses narrative coherence or comfort—exactly the kind of structurally restless, tonally slippery thing that makes consensus programmers nervous, which means it's probably doing something right.
Lichtle works within a lineage of poetic abstraction and Surrealist montage, though the brevity and thematic scatter feel more like Instagram-era aesthetics than cinema tradition; formally competent but lacks the considered architecture that makes experimental work endure.
The real lift here is the sound design—those small sonic punctuations between the visual moments create a sense of dread and momentum that a 120-second runtime could easily waste, but instead they become the connective tissue that makes the absurdity stick.
Reviews
Staged through a succession of small moments imbued with poetry, absurdity and surrealism, 'À la fin' goes much deeper than most two hour movies do.
I noticed very quickly that they reflected my anxieties and my questions about today's world.