Cayenne
2020 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Simon Gionet
During her shift at a remote gas station, a female clerk ventures into the night to fix a man's broken car, unsure if she should have trusted him.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a competent stranger-danger thriller, sure, but it's playing it so straight—the tension is all premise, no subversion. Nothing here makes me say 'wait, what,' just 'yeah, okay, I see where this goes.'
Gionet grounds this in the procedural language of genre—the isolated setting, the nocturnal vulnerability—with a clarity that respects the thriller form without claiming to reinvent it. It's disciplined work.
The decision to keep the camera tight on her face during the repair—staying with her doubt rather than cutting to the car, the night, his hands—is what transforms a simple 'should she trust him' into something that feels genuinely unsettled and earned.