Matriphagy
2025 · 7m · Malaysia
Directed by Heidi Yau Ryu Ying, Athira Hanita Shaumi
Genres: animation, drama, horror
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
In 1940s war-torn France, two nuns find themselves trapped inside an isolated church without food. As starvation deepens, one of them is forced toward an unthinkable choice.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A Malaysian student film about nuns committing matriphagy in a WWII church—this is exactly the kind of genuinely transgressive premise that makes everyone else uncomfortable and makes you realize how predictable most 'dark' cinema actually is. The fact that it's animated somehow makes the violation of faith and flesh even more obscene, which is precisely why it works.
Ryu Ying and Shaumi position themselves within a lineage of animation-as-moral-interrogation, but the execution feels slightly unmoored from the formal rigor that would elevate this beyond provocation—the tonal register wavers between horror-thriller and philosophical inquiry without committing fully to either tradition.
The decision to render human suffering and cannibalism through CGI rather than rotoscope or hand-drawn means everything here: it creates a deliberate coldness that forces you to confront the act itself rather than empathize with it, a single formal choice that transforms a shock premise into something genuinely unsettling.
Festivals
- CinemaSHORT Asian Short Film Competition 2025, Jury Award
- Kancil Awards 2025, Silver