La Course
2026 · 2m
Directed by Charlotte Montel, Olympe Chiche-Capet, Louise Lamy
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
A young classical dancer prepares to go on stage, but unable to be satisfied with her makeup, she begins to fear she will never manage it and seems to lose control.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A two-minute spiral about makeup anxiety could've been a therapy-speak cliché, but the filmmakers commit so hard to the performer's unraveling that it becomes genuinely unsettling—it's almost perverse how much dread they extract from something so mundane.
The film demonstrates considerable formal control in its use of mirror space and fragmentation, drawing from a lineage of performance-anxiety cinema while maintaining compositional restraint; the editing rhythm mirrors psychological deterioration with deliberate precision.
What elevates this from a sketch into something haunting is the single choice to let the dancer's increasingly frantic reapplication of makeup become visual repetition—each stroke more desperate than the last—turning a bathroom mirror into the entire architecture of the film's dread.