DERNIÈRES RETOUCHES
2026 · 2m
Directed by Janis Laporal
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Between care and manicure, a final gesture of love transforms the remains of a life into a ritual of beauty.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to film death with portentous music and shadow play; Laporal just... does someone's nails and somehow makes it devastate you, which is either genius or a con, and I'm genuinely unsure which.
The restraint here is exquisite—a two-minute film that understands the whole vocabulary of memento mori through the smallest, most intimate labor, placing itself quietly in a lineage of cinema that finds the sacred in the quotidian.
What makes this land is the decision to stay *on the hands*—never cutting to a face, never breaking the tactile contract between the person doing the work and the remains—and that single formal choice transforms a premise that could be maudlin into something genuinely necessary.