Vers la beauté
2026 · 2m
Directed by Lola Fourmaux
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
Agathe cannot look at herself in a mirror; she hopes her session at the psychologist will help her overcome her phobia.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A phobia-of-mirrors premise is basically self-help cinema's idea of edgy—except Fourmaux seems genuinely uninterested in the cheap catharsis, which is the only reason it doesn't immediately bore me.
The chamber-piece restraint here, that two-minute negotiation between subject and gaze, sits comfortably in a lineage of psychologically precise French cinema, though the film doesn't quite achieve the formal precision it's reaching for.
What rescues this from therapy-speak cliché is Fourmaux's decision to keep the mirror itself absent—the camera *is* the mirror, and every frameline becomes an act of refusal or acceptance; it's a single formal choice that transforms a simple premise into something genuinely unsettling.