Being Pretty
2017 · 3m · Reino Unido
Directed by David James Armsby
Genres: dark comedy, satire, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
The citizens of Autodale are told that they are pretty — they, their neighbours, friends and family. But not everyone is pretty: some are ugly, and in Autodale ugly people are not wanted.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A three-minute totalitarian beauty pageant that treats aesthetic apartheid like it's the most natural policy in the world — the absurdism is so deadpan and unironic that you can't quite tell if it's satirizing eugenics or just describing Tuesday. Exactly the kind of premise that makes people uncomfortable in the right way.
Armsby channels the procedural coldness of early Ealing sci-fi, structuring the film as bureaucratic announcement rather than narrative drama, which gives the ugliness-as-policy concept a formally intelligent weight that lesser satire would flatten into mere provocation.
The restraint is what sells it — the film commits entirely to the administrative voice-over delivery without ever showing us the cascade of human consequence, letting that absence do the actual brutality work, and it's a tonal choice that transforms a three-minute skit into something genuinely unsettling.