La Valse
2025 · 4m · Francia
Directed by Sacha Arethura
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
In the near future, Elisabeth, an 85-year-old woman, escapes her loneliness thanks to Chronoscape Solutions, a revolutionary home-assistance service that allows her to relive her youth alongside her late husband. As her memories begin to fade and the technology reveals its defects, trapped between an idealised past and the reality of her growing isolation, she must decide whether to cling to what was or accept what is.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's basically *Her* meets nursing home melodrama—competent sci-fi window dressing around a very conventional 'technology can't replace human connection' sermon that everyone's been preaching since the internet was invented.
Arethura positions this precisely within the lineage of memory-play cinema—Proust by way of speculative tech—and the film's formal restraint in depicting Elisabeth's slippage between temporal states shows real curatorial control, the kind of structural clarity that rewards a second viewing.
The single choice that crystallizes everything is how the film treats the husband's presence: never quite visible, almost always just *off*, so that Elisabeth's interactions with Chronoscape become a study in what the technology can't simulate—and that absence does more emotional work than any rendering could.