The Bite
2016 · 4m · France
Directed by Jérôme Leroy, Pierre Tolmer
Genres: dark comedy, experimental, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
A young provoker draws a penis on a wall.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Four minutes of pure sabotage—a film that takes the wholesome genre tropes everyone expects and weaponizes them into something genuinely unsettling, which is exactly the kind of subversive sleight of hand that makes consensus critics squirm.
The film demonstrates precise control over its tonal registers, positioning itself within a lineage of European absurdist satire while maintaining formal discipline in its editing and sound design across a deceptively brief runtime.
The choice to let the visual gag breathe in silence rather than underscore it—letting the audience's own discomfort become the soundtrack—is the kind of restraint that transforms a simple premise into something that lingers.