Life Style
2026 · 2m
Directed by Hanane Habib
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A young mother savours her last intimate moments with her baby in an apartment bathed in pure, dreamlike light, until a social worker arrives with a bailiff and two police officers to take the child and evict her.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects this premise to be a gut-punch, but Habib refuses the easy catharsis—she just holds the light steady while the system arrives, which is somehow more unsettling than any manipulative crescendo.
The formal restraint here is devastating: a two-minute study in negative space and what's withheld, situated in a lineage of Haneke and the Dardennes where the apparatus of state intrudes on intimate cinema, executed with absolute compositional control.
The entire film pivots on Habib's choice to keep the camera still during the arrival—no cross-cuts, no close-ups of faces, just the gradual filling of the frame with uniforms—and that single decision of what *not* to show makes the tenderness before it resonate completely differently.