Étude comparative à échelle réduite
2026 · 2m
Directed by Pauline Pauwels, Amélie Charleux
Genres: drama, experimental, mystery
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, surreal
Six friends gather in an apartment and discover, stunned, a mysterious "thing" sitting in the middle of the living room. Nobody knows where it came from, what it belongs to, or even what it is; each projects their own gaze onto it — beautiful, strange, disturbing?
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of six people staring at nothing while projecting meaning onto void—it's Rorschach as party game, which should be insufferable, but the fact that it *commits* to that absurdist premise without winking makes it genuinely unsettling in a way most experimental shorts botch.
Pauwels and Charleux understand the grammar of ensemble gazing inherited from structuralist cinema and Bresson's attention to collective reaction; the restraint here—what we never see of the 'thing' itself—demonstrates formal intelligence about what cinema can withhold and still provoke.
The decision to keep the mysterious object permanently off-frame while letting six different actors' micro-expressions do all the interpretive work is a perfect constraint-into-strength move that transforms a two-minute runtime into something that feels architecturally complete.