POW(D)ER
2026 · 2m
Directed by Louis Ponce
Genres: experimental, horror, surrealism
Tones: dark, provocative, surreal
In the closed room of an immaculate bathroom, a makeup ritual progressively tips into a frenetic mutation where the flesh fades: beauty dissected as a collective illusion and social prison, the quest for perfection becoming a silent cry fixed forever in matter.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A two-minute gut punch that weaponizes the bathroom mirror against the viewer—takes the most banal ritual of self-improvement and explodes it into a fever dream of disintegration that makes you question whether beauty was ever anything but a haunting. This is the kind of premise that makes other scouts nervous, which is exactly why it works.
Ponce situates this within a lineage of body-horror surrealism and feminist critique of beautification, executing the escalation with formal precision—the progression from ritual to mutation is architected with the clarity of a Buñuel short, every frame aware of what it's dismantling.
The singular choice here is the decision to let the flesh *fade* rather than rupture or grotesque—that specific restraint, that slow dissolution instead of spectacular breakdown, transforms what could be shock into something genuinely unsettling on a two-minute budget.