Lapse
2026 · 14m
Directed by Imogen Harrison
Genres: drama, romance, thriller
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
A surgeon misjudges a stranger during a night of escapism, in a tense romantic thriller that flips the gendered dynamics of the obsessive-affair story.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—a film that weaponizes the affair thriller genre and turns the power imbalance inside out, making us complicit in a woman's predatory gaze instead of the usual male fantasy. Harrison gets the subversion right because she doesn't announce it; she just lets the reversal do the work.
The inversion of romantic-thriller tropes situates *Lapse* within a lineage of revisionist genre work, though the execution hinges on whether the tonal control—particularly in the pivotal misjudgment—sustains the moral ambiguity the premise demands.
The film's entire architecture lives in that single moment of surgical miscalculation: the choice to make the surgeon's professional precision the mask that cracks reveals how one decision with performance and cutting can flip an entire narrative's ethical gravity on a 14-minute budget.