A.S.M.ortal
2025 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Maxime S. Girard
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, tense
A young woman becomes dangerously obsessed with ASMR videos after exposure to unusual content, spiraling into increasingly erratic behavior that disturbs her roommates.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Girard finds the horror already latent inside ASMR's parasocial intimacy and simply follows it to its logical end — that's the kind of conceptual efficiency that makes a short film feel inevitable.
ASMR obsession as horror. Eight minutes. The genre weaponizes its own intimacy — clever in theory, requires precise execution. The Ringu comparison is enormous overreach. Probably fun, probably slight.
Maxime S. Girard weaponizes ASMR's intimacy and trigger sounds as vectors of dread — turning the genre's calm against itself is a clever sensory horror gesture, even if the eight-minute scope is more parody than full possession.