IMMORTELLE
2026 · 2m
Directed by Chloé Spatzierer
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, sensual, tender
In the intimacy of a bathroom, a woman gets ready, looks at herself, celebrates herself — a simple, almost banal gesture that gradually reveals an unexpected beauty.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Self-love in a bathroom mirror sounds like the most Instagram-wellness thing possible, but Spatzierer somehow dodges that entirely—there's something genuinely weird and unsettling about how she finds beauty in the banal, and I'm not sure the film agrees with itself about whether that's liberation or delusion, which is exactly why it works.
A two-minute essay on the female gaze and intimate space that feels indebted to a lineage of feminist cinema—Chantal Akerman's durational rigor, perhaps—executed with formal precision in how the camera treats the body as both subject and landscape, making the mundane gesture of self-regard feel ceremonial.
The entire film hinges on Spatzierer's choice to hold the camera static and let the woman's relationship to her own reflection unfold without cutting away—that patience, that refusal to punctuate the moment with conventional editing, transforms two minutes of getting ready into something that feels almost devotional.