CONTRETEMPS
2021 · 7m · France
Directed by Laurine Baille, Gabriel Gérard, Lise Légier, Chloé Maingé, Claire Sun
Genres: animation, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tender
Anna, a young woman with crippling OCD, holds her life together with a rigid routine until her sister forgets a piece of her instrument; to bring it back, Anna must face an outside world where her intrusive thoughts and compulsions take shape as growing monsters.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the monsters-as-metaphor thing to feel heavy-handed, but Contretemps actually *inverts* it—the real monster is restraint itself, the suffocation of routine, and watching Anna's world literalize her intrusive thoughts without judgment is genuinely unsettling in ways most horror won't risk.
This is animation in conversation with the lineage of Carnival of Souls and Meshes of the Afternoon, a formally rigorous exploration of psychological space that trusts the language of surrealism to do the emotional work rather than explaining the disorder outright; the collaborative direction gives it a unified visual grammar that feels almost architectural.
The decision to make the monsters grow *only when Anna engages with the outside world*—not as jump-scares but as patient, grotesque unfurlings—hinges everything on restraint of the animation itself, and that refusal to spectacularize her condition into visual chaos is what actually breaks you.
Reviews
A young woman with crippling OCD confronts her worst fears head-on to save the day for her sister in this intimate, composed, and surprisingly emotional short film from five animation students at GOBELINS in Paris.