Soleil gris
2024 · 13m · Belgium
Directed by Camille Monnier
Genres: animation, drama, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Under a scorching sun, two teen girls loiter by an empty pool at a seedy desert motel while a collapsologist on the radio predicts the imminent end of the world — until the announced ecological apocalypse erupts into reality.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Collapsology radio prophecy bleeding into animated reality is deliciously high-concept, but Monnier plays it frustratingly straight—the premise does the heavy lifting while the execution just nods along like everyone else would.
The formal restraint is admirable: two figures against void, apocalypse as aesthetic rather than spectacle, a lineage stretching back through Bresson's minimalism into contemporary eco-cinema—though one wonders if the animation style fully earns its own presence.
The decision to keep the girls utterly still while the world ends around them—that deadpan refusal to react or flee—is what makes this work; it transforms teenage ennui into something genuinely uncanny, a single compositional choice that reframes the entire premise.