Angel Wings and Open Wounds
2024 · 10m · France
Directed by Mathilde Hauducoeur
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
A 7th-grade friend group orbits a leader who abuses her position during a bathroom game. The cruelty escalates, the group turns on her, and there are real consequences.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A coming-of-age story that refuses to soften its girls. The bathroom scene is doing more political work than most features manage in 90 minutes.
Middle-school social politics rendered without nostalgia or condescension — Hauducoeur takes Sciamma's playground choreography to its Lord-of-the-Flies conclusion. Real consequences, real cinema.
Middle-school social politics rendered without nostalgia or condescension — the violence and choreography of a bathroom-game power abuse. That refusal to flinch or aestheticize is the whole craft proposition.
Reviews
The film sharply captures the dynamics and increasingly unruly behavior of a complicated young friend group