Keep your hair on, Olivier
2017 · 12m · France
Directed by Armelle Mercat
Genres: animation, comedy, drama
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
A fifty-year-old chemist does everything to hide his baldness from his wife, until he is forced to use an extreme solution.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A man's descent into follicle-based psychosis is exactly the kind of premise that makes you go 'wait, WHAT?' before realizing it's actually a perfect mirror for male fragility and bodily horror—absurdist without winking, darkly comic without ever winking, which is why everyone else slept on it.
Mercat's animation discipline and tonal control here—the way she modulates between domestic realism and grotesque escalation—situates itself in a lineage of body-horror comedies and European character studies that demands formal precision, which the film executes with evident craft awareness.
The gamble is in treating baldness as genuinely catastrophic through animation rather than live-action caricature, and that single tonal commitment—refusing to mock the premise and instead following it into real psychological terrain—is what transforms a gimmick into something that lands.