LA POUPÉE LARABIE

The scouts

A wax doll seeking love sounds like the setup for a maudlin greeting card, but something in Melko's two minutes refuses sentimentality—there's a wariness here, a refusal to make the doll's blackness incidental, that genuinely troubles the fairy tale frame.

The film sits in a lineage of stop-motion fables and object-narratives, executing its premise with formal precision, though one wonders whether the whimsy quite earns the weight the material seems to demand.

The decision to hold on the doll's face—unblinking, waiting—rather than cut to family moments or magical resolution is what makes this land; it's a two-minute film that trusts its audience to do the emotional work, and that restraint is everything.