SENSORIUM
2026 · 2m
Directed by Djelassi Kenza
Genres: experimental, fantasy, thriller
In a white room outside time, five strangers are invited to a sensory experience - five keys, five cabins, five senses - guided by a soft, unsettling voice through taste, touch, smell, sight and hearing; but the temptation of excess soon turns pleasure into chaos, and only one cabin resists.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A sensory-overload fever dream that weaponizes restraint against excess—five strangers, five temptations, one cabin stays sober while the others dissolve into chaos. This is exactly the kind of premise that makes gatekeepers nervous: it refuses to pick a lane between body horror, philosophical allegory, and pure formal provocation.
Kenza constructs a deliberate architecture of sensation that recalls the structural rigor of experimental cinema's great constraint-based works, though the film's commitment to surrealism sometimes obscures the conceptual clarity that would elevate it to the lineage it's reaching toward.
The decision to anchor the entire piece on that single cabin's *restraint*—the formal discipline of shooting it differently, or holding on it longer, or stripping its sensory information—is what transforms what could be a gimmick premise into something that actually *means* something about choice and resistance.