MAL ALPHA
2026 · 2m
Directed by Pablo Leibenguth, Aurian Menard
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, satire
Tones: dark, provocative
In his quest for desirability, a young man falls under the sway of a new kind of masculinist coach, whose ideology spreads through his daily life until it suffocates him completely.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A two-minute sledgehammer about self-help grift and male ego that refuses the easy moralism everyone expects—instead it lets the ideology metastasize until it *becomes* the character, which is properly unsettling and will make certain people very uncomfortable, which means it's probably essential.
The satire lands with formal precision, positioning itself squarely in a lineage of Bunuelian social critique and contemporary portrait-of-indoctrination cinema, though the compressed runtime occasionally works against the suffocation it's trying to engineer—a deliberate choice that invites debate about whether constraint sharpens or dulls the blade.
What elevates this beyond polemical statement is the decision to let coaching speak *over* scenes rather than punctuate them, creating a verbal drowning effect that the sound design doesn't fight—a single structural choice that transforms what could have been a preachy two minutes into something genuinely claustrophobic on a shoestring.