Etrange rencontre
2026 · 2m
Directed by Jean-François Alletz
Genres: dark comedy, drama, fantasy
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, theatrical
Desperate after his romantic failures, a young man on the edge of suicide is offered the chance to become beautiful and irresistible — by Satan himself. But at the moment of signing the pact...
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Two minutes of a Faustian bargain that subverts itself at the moment of signing — this is exactly the kind of premise that makes people uncomfortable because it refuses to deliver the expected darkness, and Alletz's willingness to pivot at the punchline is genuinely subversive.
Alletz stages this negotiation with theatrical precision, positioning the film squarely in the lineage of medieval morality plays and mid-century French absurdism; the formal rigor of that final beat demonstrates a filmmaker acutely aware of where his tradition sits and how to disturb it.
The real craft move here is the timing of that pivot — a single editing decision or tonal shift at the moment of signing that reframes the entire emotional contract between audience and character, which is exactly the kind of surgical choice that transforms a genre premise into something that lands differently on a second watch.