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2020 · 13m · Alemania
Directed by Felix Charin
Genres: horror, satire, thriller
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, tense
Aurie, an aspiring Instagram influencer, travels to a resort with her boyfriend Eli hoping wellness posts will make her famous. When her following stalls, she notices something wrong with the hotel and its staff that Eli cannot see.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A horror film weaponizing Instagram vanity culture—the usual satire bait, except it actually commits to the weirdness and doesn't wink at you. The boyfriend can't see what she sees; it's a premise that could've been gimmicky, but here it lands as genuinely unsettling body-horror subtext dressed up as wellness influencer comedy.
The film understands its lineage—Polanski's paranoia films, the resort-as-liminal-space tradition—and executes with formal precision, though the tonal balance between satire and genuine dread occasionally splinters; the editing choices in the final act feel more assured than the middle register.
The single decision that transforms this: the choice to keep the boyfriend's perception blank, dead-eyed, consistent—it's not explained or dramatized, just held, which reframes the entire dynamic from couple-in-peril to something far stranger and more claustrophobic on a shoestring setup.