Eyes Wide Closed
2026 · 2m
Directed by Laura Benhaiem
Tones: contemplative, sensual, tender
In a society where perfection has emptied beauty of its soul, Nina, a young woman who has gone blind, attends a revival of a show she discovered before the world changed and, seated beside an arrogant, disillusioned man, invites him to rediscover beauty otherwise.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The setup—perfection has killed beauty, blindness becomes clarity—feels like it's gesturing toward something subversive but lands in familiar indie-romance territory; it's almost provocative, but doesn't quite have the teeth to pull it off.
Benhaiem's 2-minute architecture is formally assured, collapsing a thesis about sensory perception and aesthetic renewal into a single encounter that recalls the precision of Koreeda or Reichardt—a film aware it's working within a long conversation about beauty and witness.
The decision to let the blind protagonist *teach* rather than be taught, paired with what must be a deliberate sound design choice to make the revival experience itself the vehicle of connection, transforms what could be saccharine into something genuinely earned.