ICÔNE
2026 · 2m
Directed by Charles Stalhberger
Genres: drama, horror, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
Anna is a tortured young woman who struggles against her inner demons to the point of no longer being able to face her own reflection.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The mirror-as-demon premise is sturdy but familiar—body horror and self-loathing have been done; what keeps me from dismissing this outright is Stalhberger's refusal to psychologize it, letting the surrealism stay opaque and genuinely unsettling rather than collapsing into metaphor.
Stalhberger situates himself in a lineage of European art-horror—Švankmajer, early Cronenberg—and the formal discipline shows: every frame justifies the melancholy, the editing respects the dread rather than amplifying it, a restraint that reads as maturity.
The singular choice here is the sound design meeting the reflection distortion—there's a moment where Anna's refusal to face herself becomes tactile, almost haptic, and it's that one sensory commitment that transforms a two-minute abstraction into something you can't unsee.