Nepotism, Baby!
2026 · 12m
Directed by Tij D'Oyen
Genres: dark comedy, drama, satire
Tones: dark, melancholic, theatrical
A fame-obsessed young woman pursues Hollywood success with cold, stylized, quietly unsettling ambition.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—a film that treats ambition as something genuinely grotesque rather than inspirational, where the protagonist's hunger is styled so impeccably it becomes the horror. Most people would sand down the edges here; D'Oyen leans into the unsettling theatricality and makes the whole machine feel complicit.
The restraint in tone is notable—satire that doesn't wink, melancholy that doesn't dissolve into sentiment—placing this in conversation with a lineage of character studies that understand style as thematic argument, though the execution occasionally threatens to tip into gesture over substance.
The decision to render ambition through cold, stylized formality rather than desperate scrambling is where this lives or dies, and D'Oyen commits to that vocabulary completely—every frame's composition becomes a mirror of the character's calculated self-presentation, which is the kind of constraint that makes twelve minutes feel inevitable.
Reviews
Cold, stylized, and quietly unsettling — think Yorgos Lanthimos by way of Hollywood obsession.