Beauté Max
2026 · 2m
Directed by Jean-Érasme Giudicelli
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
A handsome young man dines for the first time at his girlfriend's parents' home, a family where beauty standards are inverted, and his presence disturbs the balance.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—a film that takes the tired dinner-party-meets-the-parents setup and flips the entire beauty apparatus on its head, then watches what breaks when the "default" handsome guy walks in. Giudicelli's doing something genuinely subversive here, making the audience complicit in their own inverted discomfort.
Beauté Max operates within the lineage of sharp European satirical comedy—Haneke's social provocations, the formal control of Buñuel's table scenes—but deploys its two-minute constraint with surgical precision, each beat of social friction precisely calibrated to destabilize both character and viewer.
The film lives or dies on a single choice: how long the camera lingers on the family's expressions when he arrives, and Giudicelli holds it just long enough to make the audience feel complicit before the absurdity fully lands—that hold is everything.