Cicatrices
2026 · 2m
Directed by Juliette Yin
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, dark
On a bench outside a plastic-surgery clinic, two men with thick bandages over their ears sit side by side — one, a content creator, talks nonstop about needing a handsome face to sell, while the other stays silent, hiding a very different reason for his surgery.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise wants to be subversive—vanity versus trauma, the influencer versus the unspeakable—but it settles into what feels like a clever writing exercise rather than something genuinely unsettling; the bandages do the heavy lifting, and the film knows it.
Yin's restraint in the mise-en-scène—two figures, one bench, the clinical architecture of the waiting room—recalls the minimalist tradition of Bresson and Kiarostami, though the tonal pivot from comedy to pathos feels slightly rushed for the formal rigor the visual language promises.
The entire film hinges on a single choice: the decision to keep the second man's silence absolute, never cutting to his interiority or a flashback reveal, which transforms what could have been a sentimental twist into something genuinely unsettling about the limits of empathy.