Syndrome de Stendhal
2026 · 2m
Directed by Théodore Pommier
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
Adèle Montclair, a painter consumed by her passion, tries to rebuild herself after a fire destroyed her studio and marked her body forever; in therapy she confronts guilt, the gaze of others, and a smouldering anger at what betrayed her.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's competent therapy-room chamber drama—well-shot, emotionally legible—but it doesn't seem interested in breaking its own form or asking why we're watching this particular wound get processed in real time; the premise does the heavy lifting, not the film.
Pommier's restraint is immaculate: the formal vocabulary of clinical space and figurative destruction recalls a lineage from Haneke through early Koreeda, where the frame itself becomes a kind of witness to trauma that refuses catharsis—a short that understands its own position in the continuum of post-dramatic cinema.
The decision to keep the fire itself offscreen and let the studio's absence do the talking is what makes this work; that single choice—trauma as negative space rather than spectacle—transforms what could've been melodrama into something genuinely unsettling on a 2-minute budget.