Agatha
2017 · 2m · Estados Unidos
Directed by Alex Goyette
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
After a long workday, a young woman looks forward to a relaxing hot bath. Darkness beyond fragile, flickering candlelight holds terrors that stand between the woman and rest.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a competent bath-time-horror setup that hits every familiar beat—candlelight, vulnerability, shadows closing in—and doesn't ask the premise to do anything unexpected or weird enough to actually disturb the tired tropes underneath.
Goyette demonstrates strong command of mood and compositional restraint, building dread through negative space and the formalist discipline of what remains unseen; the 2-minute form serves the tradition of psychological horror elegantly, even if the conceit itself isn't reinvented.
The decision to keep the camera almost entirely static while the candlelight flickers and contracts the frame does the heavy lifting—that one formal choice transforms what could've been a jump-scare exercise into something genuinely claustrophobic, made on what's clearly a minimal budget but feeling like sophisticated control.