OBSESSION
2026 · 2m
Directed by Clara Batret
Genres: drama, experimental, surrealism
Getting ready to go out, Maelys sinks into a dysmorphia crisis that engulfs her entirely; her reflection deforms, multiplies and destroys itself as, across eras and myths, she embodies Diane de Poitiers, Élisabeth Báthory and finally Narcissus.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Batret's got guts threading three centuries of female monstrosity—Poitiers, Báthory, Narcissus—into a 2-minute body-horror spiral, but it tips toward the poetic rather than genuinely unsettling; the mythic apparatus feels slightly more precious than subversive.
A formally composed descent into mirror-fragmentation that sits comfortably within a lineage of surrealist self-examination—the mythological anchoring and the precision of its visual deformation place it in conversation with everything from Cocteau to contemporary art cinema; this is the kind of formally aware short that justifies its experimental impulses.
The multiplying/deforming reflection is visually ambitious, but the real lift comes from whatever sound design or performance choice keeps Maelys's crisis grounded while the image abstract—that tonal balance between intimate dysphoria and mythic excess is what makes two minutes feel complete rather than fragmented.