HOT WAX
2026 · 2m
Directed by Alice Vuillerme
Tones: darkly comic, humorous
Two friends who work in the same beauty salon decide to take revenge on their horrible boss.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A revenge-on-the-boss premise is as conventional as they come, but if Vuillerme's actually subverting the power fantasy or warping the genre into something genuinely weird, that's worth the risk—the 2-minute runtime suggests she's got something sharper than the logline lets on.
The darkly comic revenge short sits in an established lineage of workplace satire and crime comedy, though without seeing the formal choices—pacing, editing rhythm, tonal register—it's hard to assess whether this aspires to the rigor of that tradition or merely borrows its aesthetic.
Two minutes to execute a revenge plot means every frame counts; what matters here is whether Vuillerme commits to one bold formal or performance choice—a particular visual joke, a specific beat of dialogue timing, or a camera move—that makes 120 seconds feel like enough time to justify the premise at all.