Manicure
2023 · 10m · USA
Directed by Carlos Enrique Tejera
Before her 30th birthday party, Eleanor's anxiety and demand for perfection turn a pleasant manicure into a bloody mess. A stylized body-horror short examining perfectionism, body dysmorphia, and OCD.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Body horror in a nail salon sounds like every other anxiety-porn short, but Tejera's refusal to shoot this handheld—that classical, almost Kubrickian precision applied to gore—is genuinely disorienting in a way that makes the premise feel dangerous instead of tired.
What elevates this beyond shock is the formal lineage Tejera invokes: those gliding camera movements and composed frames deliberately echo Spencer and Black Swan, situating perfectionism-as-body-horror within a specific artistic tradition while maintaining the discipline to earn each visual escalation.
The decision to frame this with balletic camera work instead of the expected found-footage aesthetics transforms a familiar psychological horror concept into something where the elegance of the filmmaking becomes complicit in the dread—it's that single tonal choice that makes the budget disappear.
Reviews
Highly solid direction. Really great set design and atmosphere. Thoroughly unnerving.
Carluccio's beautifully realized creeper is all style, but little substance. It feels more like an exercise in mood.
Festivals
- Miami Film Festival 2024
- Woodstock Film Festival 2024