Disforia
2021 · 8m · USA
Directed by Lio Mehiel, Heidi Hartwig
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
Jack returns home to find his family has sold their house without telling him, an act that may be connected to their inability to accept that he is no longer their daughter Jane. A psychological horror about coming out as trans rendered as a haunting vision of alienation and distortion.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Trans horror that earns the genre. The family selling the house without telling him IS the horror — the metaphor isn't decorative, it's structural. Lio Mehiel went on to Passages, which tracks.
Lio Mehiel directing and starring in a psychological-horror about coming home post-transition with the family selling the house is a genuinely original framing for trans narrative — closer to Jane Schoenbrun than to didactic drama.
The domestic horror of the house being sold as a literal externalization of the family's erasure of the protagonist's identity — Hereditary-family-as-horror-logic applied to trans experience with parallel timelines is a precise metaphor execution.