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2018 · 14m · Francia
Directed by Osman Cerfon
Genres: coming-of-age, dark comedy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, surreal
Twelve-year-old Jonathan lives with his sister, his mother, and a group of men who all have the same face and are hiding in the cupboards, the drawers and the television, while he tries to make sense of his world.
Picked by Felix
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A twelve-year-old's surreal fever dream where identical men nest in household furniture like a dysfunctional fever hallucination—it's the kind of "wait, WHAT?" premise that feels genuinely unhinged rather than precious, and Cerfon commits to the weirdness without winking at the audience.
Cerfon positions himself in a lineage of Latin American magical realism and psychological surrealism, using repetition and spatial constraint as formal devices to literalize the claustrophobia of adolescence and family dysfunction with the rigor of a fable.
The decision to make every man identical—not grotesque or monstrous, just *the same*—transforms what could have been a gimmicky premise into something genuinely unsettling about loss of individuality and male presence, and that single formal choice does all the thematic heavy lifting.