Giselle
2025 · 4m
Directed by Mina Chacko
Genres: drama, fantasy, mystery
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
In an adaptation of the ballet Giselle, the titular character wakes up dead, with no memories of her life or death.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Okay, so Giselle wakes up *dead* with amnesia—finally, someone's flipping the ballet on its head instead of genuflecting to it, even if the execution feels a bit too tasteful for my taste.
Chacko's intervention into the Giselle lineage operates with real formal discipline, translating the ballet's dreamscape grammar into cinema with the kind of considered restraint that asks: what does adaptation owe to tradition, and what can it interrogate within it?
The decision to strip Giselle of memory and let the surrealism unfold through her disorientation rather than explain it makes every frame count—there's craft in that economy.