En Forme
2026 · 2m
Directed by Eden Croiset
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Sensitive to the beauty criteria society imposes, a man spends his time working out to fit them, until he realises that the will to resemble an ideal makes him suffer needlessly.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A two-minute PSA about gym culture and body dysmorphia—conceptually safe enough that it almost disappears into the hot take about toxic masculinity everyone's already had. The subversion would've been letting the suffering stay unresolved, or finding something genuinely weird in the obsession itself.
Croiset's restraint in the editing and the melancholic pacing situate this cleanly within the contemporary essay-film tradition, though it runs the risk of feeling overly familiar—the kind of formally competent short that confirms what we already believe about social pressure rather than complicating it.
The specific craft choice that makes this land is the decision to stay locked on the body—the repetition of the workout sequences, the slight variations in exhaustion—until the realization arrives not through dialogue but through the *rhythm* breaking; that accumulation of small physical moments is what actually earns the emotional pivot.