Comptine D'Autrefois
2026 · 2m
Directed by Sandrine Samain
Genres: drama, mystery, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
Mysterious Isabelle receives different suitors at her home, and the viewer plunges into a universe full of secrets where appearances seem to hide another truth.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of salon mystery where nothing happens and everything's a secret—it's the kind of mannered, precious setup that usually puts me to sleep, but Samain's refusal to explain anything is almost aggressively arch enough to be interesting.
Comptine D'Autrefois positions itself squarely in the lineage of European psychological thriller shorts—all composed frames and withheld information—and executes that formal restraint with enough precision that the ambiguity feels earned rather than evasive.
The real work here is the editing rhythm: each suitor arrival is a tiny beat of tonal shift, and the decision to hold on Isabelle's face just fractionally too long each time is what transforms a thin premise into something genuinely unsettling on a micro-budget.