La Maladie blanche
2011 · 45m · France
Directed by Christelle Lheureux
Genres: drama, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
En vacances dans un village isolé des Pyrénées, Manuel et sa fille Myrtille, cinq ans, participent à une fête nocturne en plein air. Quand la fillette, réveillée par un sanglier, le suit jusqu'à l'entrée d'une grotte, son père part à sa recherche, fusil et torche en main, et la nuit bascule dans un conte fantastique sur la peur de la nature.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to call this a fairy tale, but Lheureux is actually doing something weirder—she's letting the surrealism breathe without winking at it, treating a child's night-terror logic as cosmology. The sanglier-to-cave descent refuses the rescue narrative's easy comfort, which is the move that actually matters.
A masterwork of tonal control: Lheureux locates the film precisely in the liminal space between Grimm and contemporary French cinema, using the Pyrénées as both landscape and psychological threshold. The formal restraint—torch-lit frames, the deliberate pacing—positions this within a lineage of contemplative fantasy that takes childhood fear as philosophical subject, not plot device.
The decision to keep Myrtille mostly silent and let the father's search become the emotional center inverts every instinct about child-centered narratives, and that inversion—plus the sound design choices in the cave sequences—transforms what could've been a cute adventure into something genuinely mythic on a modest budget.
Reviews
Avec « La Maladie blanche », la cinéaste questionne le spectateur sur son propre rapport à la nature, cet élément indomptable pourtant essentiel à notre équilibre et à notre survie. Christelle Lheureux offre ainsi le remède à la maladie blanche.