Jamal
2026 · 2m
Directed by Maxime Florenville, Olivier Michel
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Youssef, an impeccably dressed hitman, transports a hostage in the trunk of his car; when something in him cracks, he frees his victim for a moment and sits beside her on a bench, silently sharing a last fragment of light.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the hitman to stay a hitman; Florenville and Michel want you to watch him *not* be one, and that refusal—that crack—is genuinely subversive in a genre that trades in inevitability.
The formal restraint here is exquisite: two minutes of silence and light that recalls the contemplative precision of Bresson, the bench scene a deliberate echo of humanist cinema's confrontation with moral rupture.
That bench moment—the decision to sit beside her instead of return to the car, executed in pure negative space and shared breath—does what every restrained thriller dreams of: it makes tenderness feel like the most dangerous choice available.