Le regard d'Elise
2026 · 2m
Directed by Chloé Monteiro
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, tender
Élise lives with a dysmorphia that profoundly alters the way she sees herself; in split screen, the film confronts the vision others have of her with the intimate one shaped by her own fixations.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Split-screen dysmorphia could've been a tired formal gimmick, but Monteiro refuses to make the 'distorted self' visually grotesque—she just lets Élise's gaze be *different*, which is somehow more unsettling and true than any body-horror shortcut.
The split-screen device positions itself deliberately in the lineage of perceptual cinema—Warhol's repetition, Mulvey's gaze theory—yet Monteiro keeps the execution intimate and unshowy, letting formal rigor serve vulnerability rather than announce itself.
The crucial move here is the sound design: Monteiro doesn't differentiate the audio between the two screens, so Élise's internal and external worlds share a single soundscape, which quietly collapses the hierarchy between 'real' and 'perceived' in a way that rewires the whole premise.