Face Card
2026 · 2m
Directed by Chloé Luizard
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
It's Christmas at the Giga Fête checkout and time to pay — but the Face Card is declined.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A two-minute ambush on consumer capitalism's most sacred ritual — the transaction — where a declined card becomes a portal to absurdist dread. Luizard gets away with something genuinely weird here: taking the most banal modern humiliation and letting it metastasize into something approaching the surreal, which is exactly the kind of premise that makes people say 'wait, WHAT?'
Structurally lean and tonally controlled, this short operates in a lineage of pointed commercial satire that traces back through decades of critique on consumption and class. The restraint of the two-minute form demands precision in every frame, and Luizard's commitment to absurdism as formal strategy rather than mere gag deserves attention.
The brilliance lives in the moment the card declines — not in what happens next, but in how Luizard holds the silence and lets the mise-en-scène do the collapsing. That single decision to trust the viewer's discomfort rather than rush to the punchline is what separates this from sketch comedy and makes it something that *works*.