Tintless
2026 · 2m
Directed by Enzo Vasse
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Seeing the world without colours, Samuel has lost all hope of finding them again; on the day he must collect his antidepressants, he leaves his dirty, disordered apartment and bumps into an elderly man who leads him to confront his depression and finally rediscover the colours of his life.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The synesthetic metaphor of depression-as-desaturation is exactly the kind of well-meaning emotional literalism that makes me want to scream—except Vasse somehow threads the needle by keeping it austere enough to avoid the greeting-card trap, which is either brilliant restraint or lucky accident.
A formally competent meditation on mental illness that sits comfortably within the lineage of contemporary European art cinema, though the color-loss conceit feels slightly derivative of better-realized explorations of interiority; the tender pacing earns it, but just barely.
The decision to keep the elderly stranger almost entirely silent—letting the spatial composition and a single meaningful glance do the work of connection—is what separates this from every other depression-recovery narrative; that restraint in a 2-minute frame is everything.