BÉTAIL
2026 · 2m
Directed by Louis Marchat
Genres: crime, horror, thriller
Tones: dark, provocative, surreal
Obsessed with beauty, a man leads a secret ritual: after killing his victims, always women, he recovers parts of their bodies and applies makeup to their faces one last time before burying them, convinced he is paying them homage.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most people see serial killer + makeup and think *American Psycho* redux, but Marchat flips the script entirely—this isn't about vanity or control, it's about a genuinely deluded form of care, which is somehow more unsettling than straightforward sadism. The premise shouldn't work, and that's exactly why it does.
Marchat channels the aesthetic precision of arthouse horror—there's a clear lineage to Haneke's moral ambiguity and body horror cinema—but the 2-minute constraint forces a formal rigor that lesser filmmakers would've squandered on exposition. The restraint is what allows the premise to breathe.
The decision to shoot the makeup application itself, rather than the violence or the burial, is what elevates this from provocation into something genuinely haunting; that single choice of focus reframes the entire moral territory and does the heavy lifting on a micro-budget that could've been wasted on gore.