I Wait for the Night
2018 · 7m · Francia
Directed by Arthur Chaumay
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
An argument between two boys on the shore of an abandoned lake forces one of them to confront his inner demons.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise reads like every other introspective coming-of-age wound-licking exercise, but I'd need to see what Chaumay actually does with the argument—whether he subverts the confession-and-catharsis template or just wallows in it.
Chaumay situates this squarely in the lineage of contemplative European coming-of-age cinema—the abandoned lake, the confrontation as mirror—and the 7-minute constraint suggests a filmmaker thinking formally about how brevity sharpens emotional clarity rather than dilutes it.
What matters is whether Chaumay finds one precise moment—a look, a pause, the way one boy's silence responds to the other's words—that makes the abstraction of 'inner demons' feel like something actual and lived rather than thematic.