Au Nom de la Beauté
2026 · 2m
Directed by Anastasia Davydzenka
Genres: drama, historical, horror
Tones: contemplative, dark, mythic
In the 16th century, in an isolated village lit by flames, children are disappearing; to make this violence acceptable, the community takes refuge behind ideals of beauty and purity.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Beauty as a euphemism for atrocity is a sharp enough premise, but the execution feels a touch too aware of its own darkness—there's no real transgression here, just a well-appointed moral statement dressed in flames and disappearances.
Davydzenka situates herself squarely in the lineage of European allegory cinema, where formal restraint becomes a vessel for historical trauma; the mythic register—children vanishing behind rhetoric—recalls both folk ballad and Bresson, which is exactly the kind of considered tonality that lingers.
The choice to keep the violence architectural rather than visceral—to let the community's language do the work—is where the film earns its weight; a 2-minute runtime that trusts restraint and inference over spectacle suggests a filmmaker who knows exactly which lever moves the room.