VANITY
2026 · 2m
Directed by Joseph Ricoeur
Genres: fantasy, horror, thriller
Alexia, an occasional vlogger, finds a magnificent abandoned mirror in the street and brings it home as decoration; once inside, she finds herself facing something else entirely.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A haunted mirror premise feels stale until you realize the horror isn't about the object—it's about the vlogger recognizing herself as the thing she's been commodifying all along; Ricoeur walks right up to the line between meta-commentary and genuine dread and doesn't flinch.
The film's visual construction—how the mirror functions as a portal between the performed self and something more genuine—reads as a deliberate conversation with vanitas traditions and cinema's long relationship with reflection and artifice, though the execution occasionally favors atmosphere over formal precision.
That moment when Alexia realizes the reflection isn't mirroring her movements—a single beat of desynchronization—is the entire film, and Ricoeur trusts it completely; everything else serves that one choice, which is why two minutes feels complete.