UPGRADE
2026 · 2m
Directed by Lise Vitrac
Genres: horror, satire, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, dark, provocative
Every morning in the small town of Ashvale, a loudspeaker beneath a huge billboard broadcasts promises of a better aesthetic; everyone lets themselves be tempted by a small touch-up — but as the standards keep coming, there is no way back.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Body horror meets consumer capitalism in a two-minute guillotine—Vitrac takes the most obvious satirical target and makes it genuinely unsettling by refusing irony, just letting the loudspeaker keep talking while everyone's face dissolves into compliance. It's the kind of premise that sounds like a student exercise until you realize there's nowhere to hide from it.
A sharp distillation of the body-modification horror lineage (Cronenberg, Tsukamoto) filtered through contemporary anxiety, though the brevity sometimes reads as sketch rather than statement—the formal repetition works, but it leaves little room for the craft to argue with itself the way the best provocative shorts do.
The real architecture here is the sound design: that relentless broadcast voice doesn't shift tone or urgency, which is the cruelest choice—everyone around the protagonist capitulates not to seduction but to the banal certainty of the loudspeaker itself, and that refusal to dramatize the pressure is what makes the two minutes feel like a closing door.