DEER WOMAN
2026 · 2m
Directed by Marylou Renault
Genres: fantasy, horror, thriller
On a winter night, Léon stops to pick up a stranger at the roadside; in the intimacy of the car, the Deer-Woman of Amerindian myth — a magnetic entity who punishes men's inappropriate behaviour — tests whether he is hunter or prey.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to praise this for the mythology angle, but Renault's actually doing something weirder — she's weaponizing the intimate space of a car into a moral test chamber, which is way more unsettling than just restaging a legend.
Renault situates herself in a lineage that runs from folkloric cinema through contemporary horror-as-ethics, and the formal restraint — two minutes, one car, the mythology doing the heavy lifting — demonstrates real curatorial control over what myth can do when you don't oversell it.
The singular choice here is the decision to keep the Deer-Woman *magnetic* rather than monstrous in the conventional sense; that magnetism in the performance is what does the psychological work that cheaper jump-scares never could.