Beauté Brisée
2026 · 2m
Directed by Alexandre Tourneur
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
A young woman spends her days looking at images of idealised women on her phone; by dint of comparison, the gaze she turns on her own body warps, and seeking to reach those unrealistic standards she locks herself into self-destructive behaviours in an intimate, silent descent.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's competent social-media-mirror-holds-mirror-to-society stuff, the kind of thing that plays well at panels about digital wellness—but Tourneur doesn't twist the premise hard enough to make it genuinely unsettling or strange, which means it lands somewhere between PSA and art film without committing to either.
The restraint is admirable: two minutes of silent observation that recalls the psychological portraiture tradition of Chantal Akerman, though the execution here feels more illustrative than interrogative—a film aware of its formal ambitions but not quite rigorous enough to escape the gravity of its own message.
What makes this work is the decision to keep the phone as the only light source, letting the glow sculpt her face in real time as the content changes—it's a single technical choice that does all the thematic lifting, turning vanity into something genuinely claustrophobic without needing dialogue or score.