BLACK OUT
2026 · 2m
Directed by James Boudjena
Genres: dark comedy, thriller
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, tense
While Cassandra shuts herself in the bathroom, makeup and hairdryer plugged in, the house plunges into darkness from a power cut she herself caused; outside the storm rumbles, rain hammers the house and worrying noises turn fear into collective paranoia as the two boys fight over the hero's role.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A two-minute existential farce where vanity triggers collective disaster—the setup is genuinely perverse, and watching two boys devolve into territorial panic over who gets to be the savior while Cassandra literally causes the chaos she's hiding from is exactly the kind of subversive absurdism that makes consensus audiences uncomfortable.
Boudjena threads a precise needle between genre registers—dark comedy, domestic thriller, absurdist panic—with the kind of structural economy that recalls early Yorgos Lanthimos, where formal restraint and escalating dread become indistinguishable.
The hairdryer as both comedic prop and inciting incident is a smart constraint choice, but the real lift here is the sound design during the blackout—that storm rumble and the boys' voices competing in darkness does more storytelling work than the setup deserves, turning a simple premise into something genuinely claustrophobic.