PAR DÉFAUT
2026 · 2m
Directed by Adam Merle
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, provocative, tense
During a drunken evening, a game of truth degenerates into a settling of scores; cornered by a brutal question asking him to name the ugliest girl in the room, Tristan freezes, terrified of revealing his real answer: his own girlfriend.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A two-minute trap that uses the stupidest party game format to detonate something genuinely unsettling about desire and self-preservation—the kind of premise that sounds like a throwaway until you realize it's weaponized against the person watching it.
Merle works in the lineage of Haneke's social discomfort and the French tradition of moral claustrophobia, using the constrained space and escalating cruelty to examine how social performance collapses when truth becomes a weapon.
The genius move is the freeze itself—that moment where Tristan's paralysis does all the emotional work, and the film trusts the actor's silence more than any confession could, turning physical stillness into the film's entire thesis about complicity.