WANDA

Nicolas refuses the expected catharsis—he gives you a 12-year-old's rage without moral scaffolding or redemption, which should feel cheap but somehow doesn't, because he trusts the viewer to sit in that discomfort without rescue.

The film's formal precision in intercutting the biological and the violent—menstruation as threshold, the dog's death as rupture—marks it as a work aware of how cinema has traditionally coded female coming-of-age, and Nicolas's deliberate subversion of that grammar feels earned rather than didactic.

The singular choice here is the sound design in the film's final act: what Nicolas does with silence and the absence of a dog's presence becomes the emotional core, more devastating than any explicit violence could be, and it's that restraint—that one decision—that makes the whole thing transcend its premise.

Writer/director Nicolas cooks up a visually stunning cocktail, with the kind of sickly flavours that make it hard to stomach and destined to linger long after it's finished.

Her performance is taut and poised, and her expression often almost mask-like. While her police interview voiceover swoons with emotion, her face gives you almost nothing, and the effect is bone-chilling.

Nicolas uses our preconceptions to ingeniously wrong-foot the audience. Yet when we get towards the end of the film, we are still ill-prepared for what is about to come.