OCTOPUS
2026 · 2m
Directed by Agathe Roussel
Genres: drama, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, dark
Partner, mother, everyone's reminder: like the octopus with its eight arms, a woman invisibilises herself to stay safe and changes her appearance to face the eyes of the world.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The octopus metaphor feels a touch too on-the-nose for a film about fragmentation and self-protection, which is exactly why it probably shouldn't work—but Roussel's commitment to the visual logic of it, the shapeshifting as literal survival strategy, has enough perverse bite to make the premise feel earned rather than decorated.
Roussel situates herself squarely in the lineage of body-horror surrealism and feminist abstraction—think early Carole Roussopoulos meets contemporary video essay—with a formal precision in how she choreographs invisibility and presence across two minutes that respects the grammar of the form without genuflecting to it.
The decision to make the octopus arms the vehicle for both protection and dissolution, rather than just metaphorical dressing, is what anchors this: every costume change, every arm placement, every moment of optical vanishing becomes a concrete physical choice that justifies the surrealism and keeps a two-minute film from collapsing into abstraction.