Le petit monstre
2018 · 21m · France
Directed by Anais Vachez
Genres: fantasy, romance, surrealism
Tones: surreal, tender, whimsical
Léo, a young delivery man, falls for Emmy, a mysterious woman who never leaves her apartment, and discovers she shares her life with a strange creature that has always been there for her.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise is conventionally romantic on its face—guy meets girl—but Vachez refuses to resolve the real love triangle here: between Léo, Emmy, and the creature itself, which becomes the film's actual beating heart. It's a subversive move that lands because the film commits to the weirdness rather than apologizing for it.
Vachez positions this squarely in the lineage of European fantastical cinema—there's Kaufman in the emotional precision, a thread of Gondry in the whimsy—but the film's restraint in visualizing the creature keeps it formally honest, resisting spectacle in favor of intimate ambiguity.
The entire film pivots on a single production choice: keeping the creature mostly unseen, letting it live in shadow and suggestion, which transforms what could've been a special-effects showcase into something genuinely affecting about emotional presence and care—and that restraint is what makes the 21 minutes sing.
Reviews
La réalisatrice Anaïs Vachez a un univers surréaliste qui fait du bien. Elle nous fait retomber en enfance avec notamment un personnage attachant et inquiétant dans Le petit monstre.