O
2022 · 14m · Germany
Directed by Dominik Balkow
Genres: drama, horror, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
A woman sees a fist-sized hole in a brick wall and becomes hypnotically drawn to it, an increasingly morbid obsession that consumes her focus until the hole suddenly disappears.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A woman stares at a hole in a wall until it breaks her—it's basically the inverse of every 'character discovers magic' narrative, and Balkow refuses to explain or redeem the obsession, just lets it fester and vanish like it was never there. Most scouts would want catharsis or meaning; this is pure psychic quicksand.
Balkow works within a lineage of surrealist cinema concerned with the uncanny domestic space—the film's restraint and formal precision in framing that void recalls both Buñuel's logic-defying dread and the phenomenological rigor of contemporary slow cinema, crafting something that earns its strangeness through compositional discipline rather than spectacle.
The decision to keep the hole exactly the same size, in exactly the same place, across fourteen minutes—never widening, never deepening—is what transforms a concept into an actual short; that geometric refusal to escalate is what makes the slow dissolution of the protagonist feel inevitable rather than staged.