Regarde
2026 · 2m
Directed by Manon Arnaud
Genres: experimental, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
In an alternative Paris, humans have no faces, only a single head-sized eyeball, seeing everything without understanding; one day an exhibition draws the crowd, and one young eye-woman stops, motionless, before a display holding a work nobody seems to see, trying to pierce its meaning as an unknown emotion crosses her.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The eyeball-headed humans could've been a gimmick, but Arnaud treats it like a genuine ontological constraint—a world where vision and comprehension are brutally severed, and somehow that makes the moment of arrest before the invisible artwork feel *dangerous* instead of twee.
Regarde positions itself in a lineage of surrealist cinema concerned with the limits of perception—Buñuel's gaze games, Cocteau's metamorphosis—but executes with formal discipline: the stillness of the figure, the crowd's indifference, the two-minute compression all conspire to make incomprehension itself the subject, the craft.
The choice to keep the artwork invisible to us—to hold the camera on the eye-woman's absolute stillness while the audience is locked out of her recognition—that's the entire film, and it's a decision that transforms what could've been conceptual cuteness into something genuinely isolating and strange.