The Cormorant
2021 · 22m · France
Directed by Lubna Playoust
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Françoise and Paul, a mother and her son, are secluded in their house on an isolated island; the film intertwines two moments of their lives — youth and maturity — where the fragile but indestructible ties of their relationship are forged.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Mother-son island isolation sounds like prestige drama comfort food, except Playoust refuses the obvious emotional catharsis — she lets past and present blur into something genuinely unsettling, which is the only way a story like this avoids feeling like a Hallmark card.
The formal sophistication lies in how Playoust collapses chronology not through montage gimmickry but through sustained spatial and tonal continuity — the island becomes a palimpsest where two selves occupy the same emotional weather, a structural choice that echoes the lyric cinema of Tarkovsky without ever genuflecting to it.
The decision to shoot the two timeframes in near-identical light and geography means everything hinges on a single glance or hand gesture to communicate decades of accumulation — that restraint, and the trust it asks of the actors, is what transforms a modest 22 minutes into something that feels excavated rather than performed.
Festivals
- San Sebastián International Film Festival 2021
- Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival 2022
- Côté Court Festival 2021
- Brooklyn Film Festival 2022
- Cannes Film Festival