EIDOLON
2026 · 2m
Directed by Noé Koulbanis
Genres: drama, horror, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Haunted by the sinister vision of a marble statue, Sam inhabits his gym like a ghost in search of his identity.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A marble statue as the antagonist of the self—sure, it's haunted-house logic, but Koulbanis is doing something weirder here, treating the gym like a purgatorial maze where identity dissolves into pure surrealist texture rather than jump-scare payoff, which is exactly the kind of subversion that makes people uncomfortable.
The film positions itself within a lineage of body-horror and existential surrealism—think Tarkovsky's spatial unease meets Cronenberg's corporeal dread—and executes that lineage with considered restraint, letting negative space and the grammar of reflection do the work rather than spectacle.
Koulbanis commits to a single, devastating choice: treating the protagonist's reflection in mirrors and glass as more present than his actual body, which transforms a two-minute runtime into something claustrophobic and philosophically precise—that one compositional decision elevates what could've been generic body-horror into something unforgettable.