Autoscopie
2026 · 2m
Directed by Martin Ursenbach
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Every day, a young man loses himself in his own reflection, confusing his real appearance with the alienated image he has of it, and wonders whether he can overcome his disgust at how he looks.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise is genuinely unsettling—body horror meets identity crisis, but filtered through the mundane ritual of looking in a mirror—and yet Ursenbach refuses to punch it up or make it grotesque, which is precisely why it lands.
A formally precise interrogation of the mirror-as-threshold, working in deliberate conversation with psychoanalytic cinema and the Lacanian gaze; the restraint is everything, and the editing rhythm sustains the philosophical weight across its minimal runtime.
In two minutes, Ursenbach makes the critical choice to keep the reflection fractionally out of sync with the body—a single technical decision that transforms generic body-dysmorphia material into something genuinely disorienting and real.