La Beauté endormie
2026 · 2m
Directed by Loïc Matos
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
One day, a man wakes up and discovers that his girlfriend died in the night.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of a man discovering his girlfriend's corpse—it's pitched as grief-thriller but plays it straight, which is exactly the kind of restraint that bores me; where's the twist that makes this premise sing instead of whisper?
Matos understands the formal grammar of the domestic tragedy—the way a 2-minute runtime forces every mise-en-scène choice into the service of a single, unbearable realization—and the melancholic precision here sits in clear conversation with the lyric essay films emerging from the Riga school.
The decision to hold on the man's face *after* the discovery, rather than cutting away or showing us the body, is what separates this from a hundred other grief shorts; that single restraint choice carries the entire emotional weight.