La Conservatrice
2026 · 2m
Directed by Hadjadj Ahmed
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, melancholic
Shirine Pahlavi, an icy museum curator nicknamed 'Morticia', is especially unpleasant to her assistant Sophie, called 'Mercredi'; one day, worried, she consults her doctor: she has lost her sense of beauty.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A curator losing her sense of beauty is almost *too* on-the-nose for a film about aesthetics—which is exactly why it works as dark comedy; Ahmed's playing with the irony rather than hiding from it, and that's rare enough to sting.
The symmetry is immaculate: Morticia and Mercredi as inverse mirror images, the museum as a space where beauty becomes clinical, a two-minute structure that feels like a perfectly composed triptych—this is cinema aware of its formal debts to both melodrama and comedy of manners.
That single consult with the doctor—the moment the diagnosis lands—is where Ahmed chooses understatement over catharsis, and it's that refusal to *feel* for Shirine that becomes the film's entire emotional architecture.