BACCHUS
2018 · 5m · Denmark
Directed by Rikke Alma Krogshave Planeta
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, fantasy
Tones: sensual, surreal, theatrical
Alex, a young woman, is tired of adult life: norms, expectations, and social media replacing human contact. When she meets Bacchus, a charismatic sensual figure, he lures her into a colorful world opposite to her reality — a place free to follow instinct and explore deepest desires.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The Dionysian seduction angle is candy coating on a pretty standard 'escape reality' narrative—tempting premise, but it doesn't actually subvert the myth so much as aestheticize it. Where's the rupture that makes you uncomfortable?
Planeta stages the collision between mundane constraint and sensual abandon with real formal control; the theatrical lighting and color-coded worlds show a filmmaker aware of Cocteau and Tarkovsky, though the script doesn't quite earn the visual ambition.
That moment the color palette *shifts*—when Alex steps into Bacchus's world and the frame blooms into saturated golds and magentas while everything else drains to grey—that single production design choice is what sells the psychological break and justifies the surrealism on a five-minute budget.