MONSTRE
2026 · 2m
Directed by Carla Magri, Georgia-May Navarrete
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
Over the course of a young woman's day, each remark she receives changes not her appearance but the perception she has of herself.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise reads like therapy-speak until you actually sit with it—the subversion isn't the concept, it's that the film trusts interiority over spectacle, which feels almost radical in a landscape obsessed with visible transformation. Two minutes to dismantle the myth that the world sees you as you are.
There's a lineage here to feminist experimental cinema—the Mulvey school of turning the gaze inward—executed with enough formal precision that it could sustain a feature; the economy of the short form becomes its own argument about how quickly self-perception fractures.
The craft move is deceptively simple: they let the performance and sound design do the self-perception work instead of visual effects or clever editing, which means every microexpression has to land, and when it does, it's devastating—that restraint is what separates this from a good premise and makes it actually work.