Apnée
2026 · 2m
Directed by Lindsay Montantème
Genres: drama, experimental, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Drawn by a violent, devouring beauty, a young woman lets herself be carried away until she loses her bearings; between mirror, water, and storm, a strange presence confronts her with her excesses, and the sea becomes the reflection of her inner chaos before she relearns to breathe.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of a woman dissolving into water and mirror-logic—it's formally pretty but lands exactly where surrealism always lands, which is nowhere new; the violent beauty she's drawn to never actually confronts the viewer with anything we haven't already felt coming.
Montantème builds a rigorous visual grammar where mirror and water become philosophical counterweights rather than mere metaphor, each cut deepening the formal argument about interiority and dissolution—the kind of economical, lineal construction that recalls the best of experimental lyric cinema.
The decision to let the protagonist's breathing become the film's temporal spine—held, suspended, then released—transforms what could be abstract into something viscerally physical; that single sonic commitment makes the surrealism feel earned rather than decorative.