La Petite Sirène
2010 · 10m
Directed by Adrien Beau
Genres: dark comedy, horror, silent
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, theatrical
At the beginning of the 20th century, the orderly life of a bourgeois family in provincial France collapses into hysteria when a strange, repulsive little sea creature installs itself as master of their house.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A sea creature as domestic tyrant is inspired lunacy, but Beau plays it so formally—all theatrical staging and control—that the premise's potential to genuinely unsettle gets buried under self-awareness; it's too pleased with its own perversity to actually disturb.
Silent cinema's vocabulary applied to early-20th-century bourgeois rupture: Beau inherits a formal tradition and extends it into grotesque territory with absolute command of composition and rhythm, making the invasion feel both theatrically precise and disturbingly inevitable.
The single decision to keep the creature perpetually in frame—never off-screen, never hidden—transforms what could've been a gimmick into something genuinely claustrophobic, forcing the family's deterioration to happen in real time alongside our own mounting dread.
Reviews
Ce court-métrage muet semble tombé d'une étagère poussiéreuse de l'un des premiers bureaux de production cinématographique. Tout prête en effet à croire qu'il date d'une période révolue : le noir et blanc, les intertitres, les décors, les costumes… Cet OVNI nous plonge un siècle en arrière et s'il n