Bad Hair
2019 · 15m · Estonia
Directed by Oskar Lehemaa
Genres: dark comedy, fantasy, horror
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
A balding man orders a mysterious hair-growth serum whose effects on his body turn grotesquely out of control.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A body-horror comedy about vanity that actually *commits* to the grotesque instead of winking at it—Lehemaa treats the premise with deadpan sincerity, which is exactly why the absurdity lands. Most directors would've neutered this into quirk; he let it metastasize.
The film sits in an interesting lineage between Cronenberg's body anxiety and dark fairy-tale logic, though it doesn't quite achieve the formal precision of either; the editing occasionally softens moments that demand a sharper cut to truly unsettle.
The serum bottle itself becomes a character through repeated, escalating close-ups—a tiny production decision that transforms what could've been generic grotesquerie into genuine dread by making us complicit in each viewing.