il n'y avait pas un Chat.
2026 · 2m
Directed by Victor Vastine
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
In a house frozen in the 1970s, an orange telephone becomes the beating heart of an empty place, as messages left on an answering machine sketch a presence that never appears — there is not a soul left, yet everything still vibrates.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to call this a meditation on absence and loneliness, which is fine, but what actually kills me is that Vastine refuses to resolve the mystery—the answering machine becomes a séance that never summons anything, and that refusal to explain or sentimentalize is genuinely perverse in the best way.
This sits squarely in the lineage of structural cinema and the essayistic short form—the 1970s mise-en-scène becomes a formal constraint, and the answering machine serves as both plot device and meditation on how objects carry time; the restraint and compositional clarity deserve to be studied.
The single choice here is audio: letting the answering machine voices become the entire emotional register, while the visuals stay perfectly still and domestic—it's a reversal that costs nothing and makes the two-minute runtime feel like held breath.