Dent de laid
2026 · 2m
Directed by Max Corbet
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
Caroline gives birth to her first child, but when the midwife hands her the baby she refuses to take him: he is too ugly, in her words. A negotiation begins between the parents and the midwife to get them to accept the newborn.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A mother refuses her newborn because he's ugly—and the film doesn't flinch, doesn't sentimentalize, just watches the absurd negotiation unfold like a twisted social contract collapsing in real time. This is the kind of premise that makes festivals nervous and everyone else wonder why it works.
Corbet situates this dark comedy in a lineage of Bunuelian provocation and postwar absurdism, where the clinical space of the delivery room becomes a stage for examining aesthetic judgment and parental obligation with formal precision.
The real lift here is the midwife's performance—that steady, almost bureaucratic insistence on acceptance while everyone else fractures—which transforms what could be a one-note shock premise into something genuinely unsettling and human.