l'alien
2026 · 2m
Directed by Théo Köse
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
On a station platform, she leaves him; finding himself alone in a city foreign to him, he decides to go home — only to feel all the more a stranger to what he has always known.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of someone feeling displaced in their own hometown—it's the quietest possible premise, which is exactly why it shouldn't work, and yet Köse commits to the restraint so completely that the banality becomes unsettling; the kind of subtle inversion most filmmakers would've ruined by adding a twist.
A formally disciplined study in spatial alienation that recalls the measured melancholy of Haneke or Akerman—the editing holds steady where lesser shorts would puncture the moment, trusting the architecture of platform and city to do the philosophical work without sentiment.
The decision to keep the camera static, letting the geometry of departure and return mirror each other across the two-minute structure, transforms a simple emotional arc into something architecturally perfect; that stillness is doing all the heavy lifting.