Hypersensitive
2025 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Martine Frossard
Genres: drama, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
After grief, a hypersensitive young woman moves through a dreamlike, plant-inspired inner world where heightened perception fragments and reforms into a source of resilience and healing.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Grief-to-healing through plant metaphors is basically the festival circuit's comfort food right now, and Frossard's dreamlike earnestness doesn't subvert the formula—it genuflects to it, which is fine if you're into that, but I'm not.
Frossard's formal restraint in rendering the surreal—the way she lets botanical imagery breathe rather than overcomplicate—places this firmly in the lineage of post-Rothko introspective cinema; the editing architecture supports rather than decorates the emotional architecture.
The singular choice here is letting the hypersensitivity live *in the editing itself*—fragmentation that mirrors perception rather than illustrating it—which turns what could've been a soft indie grief story into something structurally precise and genuinely unsettling.