Été maison hantée
2021 · 14m · France
Directed by Théo Hoch
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, mystery
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
After the death of Killian, a childhood friend unseen for fifteen years, Ludo returns to their old neighborhood and relives the last summer they spent together in the shadow of the unsettling house next door.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a ghost story that isn't really about ghosts, a coming-of-age film that treats adolescence like archaeology—Hoch's betting everything on restraint and mood, which is either brave or boring depending on whether you're tired of genre scaffolding.
Hoch positions this squarely in the French literary tradition of memory-as-landscape, where the haunted house becomes a formal device for exploring how we construct and revise the past; the editing rhythm and tonal consistency suggest a filmmaker very aware of what he's inheriting and how to complicate it.
The singular move here is treating the 15-year gap not as exposition to overcome but as a deliberate temporal collapse—every cut between present and childhood plays as a small rupture, and that formal choice is what transmutes a straightforward premise into something that actually *feels* like memory.