Dysmorphia
2018 · 8m · United States
Directed by Phillip Vernon, Elijah Guess
Genres: dark comedy, drama, horror
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
Instagram influencer Dorian Dash documents nearly every waking moment for his followers, but when grotesque warts begin appearing on his body he hides them and grows paranoid, unaware the deformity is psychological rather than physical.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Dysmorphia inverts the body-horror genre by making the real monster invisible—a psychological glitch dressed up as grotesque skin—and then watches an influencer spiral into paranoia over something that was never there. It's the kind of premise that makes you sit with the absurdity of it, which is exactly why it works.
Vernon and Guess demonstrate sophisticated control over tone here, threading dark comedy and psychological horror through a formally restrained eight minutes that recalls the introspective lineage of contemporary short cinema concerned with digital self-presentation and embodied anxiety.
The film's entire power hinges on the choice to keep the warts unseen—the audience only ever sees Dorian's mounting panic and the empty space where deformity isn't—which forces the budget constraint into the film's conceptual spine and makes paranoia the only real monster.