The Estheticist
2026 · 2m
Directed by Adrien Viglianisi
Genres: dark comedy, horror, mystery
Tones: dark, darkly comic, surreal
A mother grows worried by the strange noises coming from her little daughter's room, possibly linked to the girl's recent change of appearance: little by little, she is turning into a real monster. What could have such a demonic influence on her?
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A two-minute film that buries its actual subject—parental anxiety about a daughter's autonomy and self-invention—inside a monster-transformation premise, then refuses to deliver the jump-scare payoff everyone expects; it's the kind of subversive misdirection that makes conventional horror scouts furious and makes me want to program it twice.
Viglianisi works within the body-horror lineage of Cronenberg and early Tusk, but the film's real precision lies in its restraint—the noises remain off-screen, the transformation ambiguous—positioning it as a studied deconstruction of parental-surveillance tropes that argues through formal refusal rather than spectacle.
The entire film hinges on a single sound design choice: keeping the daughter's voice or presence just barely off-frame, which forces the mother's (and our) imagination to do the monstrous work; that economy of restraint in a two-minute runtime is what elevates this from premise to something genuinely unsettling.