Nell
2025 · 10m · USA
Directed by Clara Mamet
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, provocative, theatrical
A veiled cello prodigy prepares for her first televised performance under the suffocating weight of her stage mother's ambition. Hollywood's relationship with face, fame, and female bodies gets put on the operating table.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Clara Mamet directing her mother Rebecca Pidgeon in a film about stage mothers? The meta layer alone is worth the runtime. Veil included.
A veiled protagonist routing Lanthimos-adjacent dread through Hollywood's hunger for image — Clara Mamet inheriting her parents' theatrical instincts while staking out her own formal territory. The black veil is doing real conceptual work.
A protagonist whose face stays veiled the entire film is a hell of a thesis — Clara Mamet making the camera's hunger for image into the actual subject of a dark comedy is sharp work. The Mamet/Pidgeon family staging adds a meta layer about Hollywood faces that the film seems aware of.
Reviews
An enthralling dark comedy dissecting and disassembling themes of fame and physical appearance.