Merci Marcel
2026 · 2m
Directed by Carla Hernandez
Genres: comedy, coming-of-age, surrealism
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, tense
At a tense dinner at his girlfriend's house, a teenager offers a disastrous homemade cake that plunges the little brother into supernatural ecstasy; between social unease and chocolate hallucination, the evening turns surreal.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A teenager's homemade cake as a portal to the surreal—most scouts would've binned this as twee indie whimsy, but Hernandez commits to the weirdness without winking, letting chocolate hallucination and family dinner dread occupy the same frame until you can't tell which is which.
Hernandez situates this squarely in the lineage of Buñuel's domestic uncanny and contemporary surrealist comedy, with formal precision in how the dinner's social geometry fractures as the supernatural intrudes—each cut between the brother's ecstasy and the teenager's mounting embarrassment sharpens the film's tonal control.
The choice to make the little brother's face the film's emotional anchor rather than the protagonist—his wordless, escalating euphoria becomes the camera's obsession—is what transforms a gimmick premise into something genuinely disorienting and specific.