NARCISSE-404
2026 · 2m
Directed by Adrien Bonjean, Clément Vanmel
Genres: experimental, sci-fi, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
A man lost in the middle of a field, frame in hand, faces the landscape while a mechanical shadow stalks him — Narcissus pursued, as narcissistic beauty, human or technological, voraciously consumes itself in its own gaze.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Two minutes of a man becoming prey to his own reflection made algorithm—it's a premise that should feel overwrought, but Bonjean and Vanmel somehow make digital narcissism *genuinely* unsettling by refusing to wink at the metaphor. Everyone else would've buried this under irony; they let it breathe into something actually subversive.
The invocation of Ovid's myth paired with contemporary surveillance aesthetics shows formal ambition, and the compositional restraint—frame within frame, shadow as negative space—recalls the structural rigor of early experimental cinema. Whether the execution sustains that lineage is what makes it worth defending in a room.
The mechanical shadow itself is the film: by making it move with *just* enough wrongness—not quite matching the man's rhythm—they trigger pure unease on a technical level, and that single design choice transforms what could've been pretentious into something that physically works on the viewer.