PERFECTUM
2026 · 2m
Directed by Anouk Naura, Sacha Benoit
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
Apollo, 18, has grown up in a household where beauty, sport, balance and superficiality dominate every form of affection. Striving in vain to meet these family demands, he watches his dream of perfection turn into a nightmare.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Yet another tortured-perfectionist-kid story—except it actually *inverts* the usual coming-of-age catharsis into something genuinely unsettling, where the nightmare doesn't resolve into wisdom but just... stays. Two minutes of formal precision that refuses the redemption arc everyone expects.
Naura and Benoit situate themselves squarely in the lineage of body-horror and psychological descent (Haneke, maybe early Ducournau), but the economy of their form—what they *don't* show, the editing rhythm that mirrors Apollo's fracture—marks this as proper craft cinema, the kind that rewards a second viewing.
The single structural choice that makes it work is the refusal to cut away: holding on Apollo's face through the moments where dissolution should prompt a shot change, letting the camera become complicit in the very perfectionism that's destroying him.