La Muse
2026 · 2m
Directed by Margaux Maurille, Ynalaura Jones
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Through a painter's obsessive gaze, the film explores the troubling relationship between the artist and his model, where the quest for perfection turns inspiration into unease.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The obsessive-artist-corrupts-the-muse angle is basically the oldest trap in the art-world playbook, and this leans into it rather than interrogating it—feels more like confirmation bias than subversion.
The film's restraint in a two-minute frame, the way it builds unease through the painter's gaze rather than explicit transgression, situates it squarely in a lineage of psychological portraiture that goes back through Polanski and Hitchcock—formally aware of what discomfort looks like.
Two minutes is a brutal constraint, but the choice to let the model's shifting expressions do the heavy lifting, rather than cutting between canvas and face, is the decision that transforms voyeurism into something genuinely unsettling.