APOLOGIE
2026 · 2m
Directed by Sibyline Borzakian
Genres: drama, experimental, horror
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
As she gets ready to go out, Salomé wages a violent inner struggle against a reflection that is not the one she wants to be, until her bathroom becomes the theatre of a destructive ritual of guilt and disgust.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Borzakian's premise feels almost too on-brand for the self-loathing cinema circuit, but the fact that she makes a two-minute bathroom descent feel genuinely unsettling—not through jump scares, but through the specificity of that reflection refusing to cooperate—is the kind of subversive restraint that actually sticks.
The ritualistic structure and surrealist grammar situate this firmly in a lineage of body-horror and mirror-anxiety cinema, though what elevates it beyond thematic inheritance is the formal discipline: every destructive gesture in that bathroom is metered, considered, almost choreographed into something approaching baroque precision.
The entire film hinges on one choice—treating the reflection not as a jump-scare double but as a separate entity with its own resistant will—and that single decision transforms what could've been a student exercise in body disgust into something that actually breathes with real formal intelligence on a micro budget.