Chrysalide
2026 · 2m
Directed by Bérénice Thibaudet, Manon Regal
Genres: drama, essay film, satire
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
The filmmakers explore how beauty, depicted as a veritable industry and an almost mechanical routine many women scrupulously follow, leads society's perverse gaze on women to suffocate and even destroy them — since imposing an aesthetic norm would mean nothing without someone to judge it.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of feminist essay-film polemic could've been a TED talk, but Thibaudet and Regal actually subvert the form itself—making the machinery of beauty into something visually suffocating rather than just arguing about it, which is the move most filmmakers are too timid to commit to.
The film's formal rigor—how it transforms the aesthetics of beauty documentation into a visual argument about complicity and the male gaze—situates it squarely in a lineage of feminist cinema that trusts form over exposition, recalling everything from Chantal Akerman's durational critique to contemporary essay film's best instincts.
What elevates this beyond polemic is the decision to make the *routine itself* the subject: the editing rhythm and sound design that render beauty rituals as mechanical loops creates an uncanny specificity that no amount of budget could generate without that one structural choice.