Spot the Differences
2023 · 7m · France
Directed by Brune de Cerval, Fleur Larcena, Clémence Beauprez, Aurélie Lequien, Yohan Gameiro, Samantha Liu
Genres: coming-of-age, fantasy, mystery
Tones: contemplative, surreal, whimsical
Lottie, a nine-year-old perfect little girl, discovers a sumptuous dollhouse in her attic that is the exact replica of the imposing Victorian house she lives in. The dollhouse is a spot-the-differences game with very strict rules, and Lottie begins an obsessive quest to find the differences between her house and its miniature copy.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to coo about the whimsy and the dollhouse metaphor, but what actually gets me is how the film resists the obvious psychological reading—it doesn't psychoanalyze Lottie's obsession, just lets it *be*, which is weirder and more subversive than any twist ending could be.
A formally precise chamber piece that understands the tradition of visual puzzle-box cinema while earning its surrealism through patient mise-en-scène and the disciplined interplay between full-scale and miniature space—the kind of considered visual grammar that justifies a six-person directorial collective.
The genius here is the sound design decision to keep the dollhouse eerily *silent* while the real house breathes with ambient life; that single choice reframes the entire game from cute to unsettling, and transforms what could've been a Children's BBC segment into something genuinely haunting.