Mei Ling
2009 · 15m · Francia
Directed by François Leroy, Stéphanie Lansaque
Genres: comedy, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, surreal, whimsical
Mei Ling, a young idle Chinese woman living alone in her apartment while waiting for her lover, discovers a tiny octopus hidden in her sink and adopts it to kill her boredom as it keeps growing.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A woman + octopus premise could've been twee fantasy garbage, but the film's willingness to let loneliness and surrealism sit uncomfortably together—never winking at the audience—is genuinely disarming.
The film positions itself in a lineage of poetic French cinema (Vigo, early Rohmer), using the octopus as Buñuelian intrusion into bourgeois stasis, though the tonal balance between whimsy and ennui occasionally softens its formal argument.
The decision to let the octopus grow in real time—practical effects, patient camera—transforms what could've been a metaphor-delivery system into something tactile and genuinely unsettling; that constraint is what makes the emotional core land.