BEAUTY SOCIETY
2026 · 2m
Directed by Charles Fersing
Genres: dark comedy, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: absurdist, dark, provocative
The Earth has taken in more humans than it could hold, and the nations have founded the Beauty Society to regulate the population: at its head, Mr Kay, whose job - helped by his advisers - is to choose who must live or die, with beauty as the main criterion; during one seemingly banal meeting, Kay realises the person he has ordered executed is someone close to him.
Picked by Felix
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A eugenics committee meeting that turns into a personal horror story—Fersing swings the premise like a cudgel, refuses the obvious catharsis, and somehow makes bureaucratic dystopia darkly funny instead of preachy. Everyone else would've played it straight; he plays it wrong, which is exactly right.
The film channels a lineage from Shirley (2020) through to mid-period Haneke: institutional evil rendered mundane through measured framing and the restraint to let the horror sit in the room with the characters, though the two-minute format strains the philosophical weight it's trying to bear.
The pivot—the moment Kay recognizes the executed person—lands because Fersing holds on his face for just long enough that we don't cut away from the recognition itself, trusting the actor and the single beat rather than editorial punctuation to carry the entire film's moral collapse.