USER_18
2026 · 2m
Directed by Gaetan Ghionda
Genres: drama, experimental, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
Léa, a young woman who can only feel beautiful through a screen, slowly detaches from herself between her reflection and the gazes of strangers, until she fades while the screen keeps watching.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's doing the social-media-alienation thing now, but Ghionda actually inverts it—the screen doesn't corrupt her, it *replaces* her, which is a genuinely unsettling escalation that most directors are too timid to commit to.
The formal rigor here sits squarely in a lineage of body-horror and digital-age surrealism (echoes of Hardie and Svankmajer), executed with restraint that lets the metaphor breathe rather than overstate it.
In two minutes with minimal resources, Ghionda makes the decision to shoot the fading not as a dramatic crescendo but as a *slow pixel dissolution*—that one technical choice turns a familiar anxiety into something tactile and haunting.