La chambre froide
2026 · 2m
Directed by Manon Barret
Genres: drama, experimental, horror
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
In a dark, oppressive apartment appears Elle, whose body is human but whose face is entirely smooth; in her bathroom, surrounded by images of feminine beauty, she longs for the faces she does not have, until her relationship to appearance takes a disturbing turn.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A two-minute film about a faceless woman obsessing over beauty standards could be heavy-handed pablum, but Barret twists it into something genuinely unsettling—the "disturbing turn" premise suggests she's not interested in easy critique, and that's exactly the kind of subversive move that makes you uncomfortable in the right way.
The formal precision of the bathroom-as-shrine mise-en-scène recalls Body Horror's lineage through New French Extremity, and Barret's restraint in the edit—letting discomfort accumulate through negative space rather than explicit gore—positions this within a rigorous, considered tradition of body-based cinema.
The single decision to render the face as smooth absence rather than grotesquely deformed is what makes this work: it's abstraction rather than shock, which forces the viewer's discomfort inward, and that restraint on a micro-budget is where the real craft lives.