Spell on You
2021 · 21m · France
Directed by Sarah Lasry
Genres: coming-of-age, fantasy, horror
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
Salomé, a ten-year-old disgusted by the wart on her nose, spies on her parents at night as strange unspoken things happen in the house, and a spell is cast that awakens her own unearthly powers.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a coming-of-age horror film, which sounds like every other festival submission—but Lasry commits to the surreal logic of a child's perspective so completely that the parental transgression becomes almost ambient, a hum under the skin rather than a plot point. The film refuses to explain itself, and that refusal is the whole thing.
Lasry situates herself in a lineage of European art-horror and body-horror cinema—there's Cronenberg's sensibility of family as transgression, and the formal restraint recalls Catherine Breillat's rigorous gaze on youth and disgust. The editing pace mirrors a child's fractured attention, each cut a kind of spell in itself.
The film's entire power pivots on the decision to keep the parents almost entirely off-screen and silent—we get their hands, their shadows, their presence as felt absence—which forces every ounce of psychological weight onto Salomé's face and the camera's slow lateral movements through her house. That single structural choice transforms what could be exploitation into something genuinely unsettling and intimate.