LA PORTE FERMÉE / The Closed Door
2026 · 2m
Directed by Aouatefe Lahmani
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, provocative
In a psychologist's office, patients come and go, all talking about beauty — too much, not enough, lost, fantasised — until a little girl sits down and, with disarming simplicity, reveals what the adults refuse to see.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Everyone's going to read this as a precious moral lesson about authenticity, but Lahmani's actually detonating the whole therapy-speak industrial complex—two minutes of adults performing their neuroses before a kid walks in and casually ruins the entire apparatus. It's wickedly subversive precisely because it looks like it's being sincere.
The film operates within a classical dramatic structure—the unmasking scene—yet executes it with formal restraint that recalls Haneke's interest in social performance; the repetition of the office setting becomes its own argumentative device, each monologue adding pressure until the reversal lands with the weight of inevitability.
The pivot is the girl's delivery—that specific register of unselfconscious clarity cutting through two minutes of performative anxiety—and Lahmani trusts it completely, refuses to underscore or manipulate it, which is exactly the kind of casting-and-cutting discipline that transforms what could be sentimental into something genuinely disarming.