Less Than Human
2017 · 6m · Dinamarca
Directed by Steffen Bang Lindholm
Genres: drama, fantasy, horror
Tones: dark, melancholic, surreal
Pushed beyond her breaking point by an endless routine of duties and lessons, Princess Maria is swept into the dark, dark woods full of monsters.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A princess-in-peril setup that could've been paint-by-numbers, but Lindholm leans so hard into the surreal dread and the actual psychological breaking point—treating the woods less as escape fantasy and more as collapse—that it becomes genuinely unsettling in ways the premise has no right to be.
The film sits in deliberate conversation with Gothic fairy tale imagery and psychological horror tradition, executing a formal restraint in its surrealism that feels rooted in a lineage from Grimm through contemporary art cinema; the melancholy tone refuses spectacle, which is a curatorial choice worth watching.
What locks this 6 minutes is the decision to keep Maria's face and reaction largely opaque while the world around her becomes increasingly fragmented—that withholding of emotion while everything unravels creates a dissonance that a bigger budget would've explained away, but here it becomes the whole engine.