The 33rd edition of Gérardmer's International Fantastic Film Festival took place in a deliciously strange atmosphere, from Tuesday 27 January to Sunday 1 February 2026. Always followed by KillerS7ven and the celest wolf, this new occult chapter did not derogate from its reputation: a joyful pack of festivalgoers, a mountain air that stings the cheeks, unlikely encounters in queues, generous plates and these passionate discussions that stretch until the bar of the Grand Hotel finally decides to close. Once again, all Gérardmer vibrated at the pace of the fantastic.
And to open the hostilities, or should I say the conjuration, it's the celest wolf who draws his brand new onboard grimoire. A new format, freshly ripped from the claws of the night, where each page seems to breathe, shudder... and sometimes growl when you turn it too fast.
Armed with his feather soaked in the mist of the lake, our canis lupus of the Pyrenees s'adventure behind the scenes of the festival, notes what moves, which roams, which screams (sometimes himself), and turns every moment into a little reading spell. It is even said that its grimoire attracts the curious as a capricious projector attracts creatures who do not like the light too much.
Anyway, if you thought you'd start quietly... bad pick. This aboard grimoire is not there to tell: it is there to bite. And once you put the snout in it, it's impossible to come out unharmed. Come on, courage. The first scream just fell. The fantastic is waiting for you.
Contents
🌧️ Day 1: Weather attack, festival response
The 33rd edition of the Gérardmer Festival opens in a setting that only the Vosges can offer: a continuous rain, not violent enough to discourage, but insistent enough to transform each trip into a micro-shipment. Between the umbrellas that clash, the wet badges and the improvised discussions under the marqueses, the city regains its rhythm at the end of January: that of a small mountain port where the cinephiles dock, flowing but delighted.
After a stop at the Grand Hotel, where the familiar atmosphere serves as a decompression airlock after the swallowed kilometers, the aperitif simmers in front of Godin Marc, far too busy to be disturbed, while some members of the jury discuss at ear. Barely the time to dry out that already the Opening Ceremony is announced, ready to launch hostilities in a saturated atmosphere of humidity.
Opening ceremony, held on Tuesday 27 January, which confirms what was being anticipated: Gérardmer lost nothing of his sense of ritual. Speech, presentation of the jury, reminder of the challenges of this 33rd edition... All in a room where one would almost hear the coats dry. The festival starts in order of march, with this solemnity a little cabossed that makes its charm: we are there to shiver, laugh, debate... and, if possible, forget that we have wet socks.
Send Help
The pitch is simple: two colleagues, Linda Liddle and Bradley Preston, are propelled out of their routine after a plane crash that leaves them stranded on a deserted island. Cut off from the world, deprived of their well-oiled roles, they see their hierarchy crack faster than an Excel spreadsheet on Monday morning. The survival then turns into a psychological duel, where everyone tries to take his hand... or just keep the knife.
In this stripped decor, Sam Raimi gives heartily joy to dynamit the codes of the corporate world. The boss convinced of being a visionary, the undervalued employee who makes the shop run, the tiny but daily humiliations: all this little theatre of the office suddenly finds itself exposed, without costume or facade. A perfect echo to the theme of this 33rd edition, « Get off the masks. », so Send Help fun to rip off those you carry to work. Professional frustrations become sparks here: it crackles, it smokes, and it inevitably burns something.
Raimi finds his favorite playground. One feels the pleasure of the filmmaker who reconnects with his reflexes of the grotesque and the gore: visual gags that degenerate in carnage, slapstick dripping, camera that veers as if she had swallowed an espresso too tight. It's outraged, deliberately excessive, sometimes almost childish... and that's exactly what gives this B series its bite. Raimi does not seek the likelihood: he seeks the gesture, the shock, the jubilation of the « too much », this raw energy which already made the salt of its Evil Dead.
Send Help Finally acts as a deformative mirror of the world of work: we recognize attitudes, faults, power relations ... but passed through the filter of a sadistic cartoon. Rachel McAdams found a role commensurate with her talent, oscillating between fragility and anger, while Dylan O的Brien composed a boss so unbearable that one would almost thank the island for having isolated her.
In the end, Raimi signs an opening film that shakes spectators like a wet tree. A gesture of lively, wicked, rejoicing cinema, which reminds us that one of the few to know how to marry social satire and great-guignol with so much deplomb. A start to a festival that falls by peak: masks fall, rain too, and Gérardmer can start to shiver...
Gérardometer : 🎭🎭🎭🎭
❄️ Day 2: Snow imposes its decor, the festival responds with its rhythm
The rain, weary dampening the festivalgoers, passed the relay to a compact, determined, almost administrative snow. The kind of snow that doesn't fall: it settles down. Gérardmer then turns into a soft survival decor, where each sidewalk becomes a scene cut off from The Thing and every climb to LAC Space a test of loyalty to genre cinema. Umbrellas have made life, cups have taken power, and badges, already martyred the day before, now look like archaeological relics.
Fortunately, a landmark remains: David Rault , faithful to the post, smile in shoulder strap, sharpened diction, able to revive a room like an old 35 mm projector. He launches hostilities, reinvigorates the public... and the selection can begin to reveal his faces.
Welcome Home Baby
Andreas Prochaska signs a domestic nightmare that summons the shadow of Rosemary, not by quotation but by this way of letting the occult infiltrate into the most ordinary gestures. The film looks at motherhood as a space where domination, heritage and buried beliefs replay, and where every family ritual becomes another mask to bring down.
The staging, dry and methodical, tightens the space around her heroine like an insider circle that closes. The main actress, of fragile intensity, navigates between lucidity and vertigo, embodying a woman who discovers that her own body may no longer be her own.
In this 33rd edition under the sign of « Get off the masks. », Welcome Home Baby finds an immediate resonance: here, it is the lines, traditions and bodies themselves that reveal what they were hiding.
Gérardometer : 🎭🎭🎭
Planets
In a world that has already paid the price of our choices, Momoko Seto proposes an ecological fable to the height of ambitious dandelions, where nature breathes, struggles and organizes like a miniature people. But anthropomorphism, movements « intentional » behaviour « Dramatized », supposed to open a sensitive door, seemed superfluous, almost decorative. Macro textures, timelapse assembly, digitally reworked images make up a hypnotic ballet that, paradoxically, never hit.
The film talks about survival, plant resistance, the end of the world. Yet, by refusing any readable narrative, he ends up dissolving his own discourse. You feel the desire to be carried by the wind, but this float becomes a drift, a distance.
The result: a sensory experience that is intended to be immersive, but which seemed opaque, distant, hermetic. A visual odyssey that levites without ever actually carrying.
Gérardometer : 🎭🎭
Ribs
Raymond St-Jean weaves a story where the forest is not a setting, but an organism that absorbs, transforms, contaminates. The film navigates between family drama, turbulent investigation and bio body horror, with sometimes brilliant visual ideas, as when flesh and plant respond, mix, parasite.
But Ribs hesitating: sometimes clear, sometimes opaque, sometimes fascinating, sometimes rough. The staging captures the density of the forest, but the narrative is lost in its ramifications, as if the film refused to choose between realism and mutation.
An unequal object, but through moments when the organic takes over its rights. Besides, if he does not fit in front of the festival theme, he embraces the spirit out of capillaryness. Here, the mask is not a hidden face: it is a layer of plant that infiltrates, a skin that changes, an organism that grafts.
What is going on under the surface, in those areas where identity cracks and the body becomes a ground of mutation? A moving biological mask that fits perfectly with this edition without ever claiming it.
Gérardometer : 🎭🎭
Donate Leave the Kids Alone
Emilio Portes signs a playful, nervous domestic thriller, which plays with the codes of haunted home movie and family drama... while slipping a wink d'oeil assumed to Mom, I missed the plane!, evil version, obviously.
The film addresses tensioned parenting, guilt, solitude of children and how fear distorts brotherly ties. The staging is lively, precise, always in motion, and the young actors are impeccable in their progressive climb towards paranoia.
And under his malicious entertainment airs, the film focuses on revealing what is hidden behind the roles that everyone takes on: the certainty of adults, the bravades of children, the false-likers of a home that cracks as soon as fear invites itself. A discreet but clear way to remember that, in this festival, appearances never hold long.
An effective, malicious proposal that assumes its pleasure of twisting daily until the breakup.
Gérardometer : 🎭🎭🎭🎭
I Live Here Now
Julie Pacino, daughter of, claims a lynchian vein... but here, with big hoofs: supported symbols, abrupt transitions, nightmare visions that do not seek subtlety.
And yet... it works. The film explores the interiority of a woman in crisis, the pain, the reconstruction, the upset motherhood, with a sincerity that goes beyond her awkwardness. The atmosphere (sometimes captured in 16 mm) is dense, enveloping, almost hypnotic, and the isolated hotel becomes a character that reveals what the protagonist tries to hide.
In his own way, I Live Here Now dialogue also with the theme of the festival: not by a game of fakes, but by the frontal exhibition of an inner, psychic, almost visceral mask. Pacino does not seek to hide: she exposes, sometimes with insistence, what works under the skin of her character.
A fragile, excessive, but deeply inhabited work... and, in my view, far more accomplished than his welcome suggests.
Gérardometer : 🎭🎭🎭
🧣 One festival, two climates, three layers of clothing
Over the course of the screenings, an atmosphere emerges: the films reveal their masks, the audience adjusts their own, and the Gérardmer Festival regains its special balance between chill and cold bite. Barely out of a session the reality resumes its icy breath: conversations continue under the awnings, gloves circulate like essential goods, and festivalgoers advance in the snow with the determination of a casting of The Return Caffeine.
This second day stretches between dark rooms and flakes of flakes, between cinematic visions and snow gusts that sting the air. The weather becomes a secondary character, sometimes invasive, sometimes complicit, but always faithful to the spirit of the place. Each film adds its stratum, each release its cloud of steam, and the ensemble composes this January fresco that only Gérardmer knows how to offer.
When the evening falls, the cheeks are red, the shoes soaked, but the spirit boils. The competition is launched, the debates are underway, and the snow continues to fall as if it wanted to participate in the programming.
A frosty atmosphere, a festival that begins to heat: everything is in place for the 3rd day...
⛄ Day 3: The fog is advancing, the festivalgoers also
The third day opens in a strange atmosphere, almost suspended: the snow stopped, the rain fell, and the city drowned in a thick mist, soft as a veil but dense enough to transform each silhouette into an appearance. Gérardmer is no longer quite a survival setting or a wet mountain port: it has become a spectral landscape where festivalgoers slide from one session to the next like hungry ghosts... sometimes cinema, sometimes tartiflette.
In this silent wadding, the needs become very concrete again: warm, fill, keep pace. The restaurants turn into cheese bunkers where the batteries are recharged before diving back into the dark of the rooms. Raclettes, flambé munster, gratins capable of knocking a bear: a short, greasy, vital ritual that keeps the festivalist in a state of operation.
And once sustened, they all return to the mist, where queues become hot spots of social warmth. The program is redone, the films of the day before are disassembled, the ones that we haven't seen are encenseed, the state of badges already fossilized is compared. It talks, it laughs, it shares a burning tea: in these corridors of human steam, the festival finds its real pulse.
Then there are the snowmen, out of the snow piled up the day before like a silent army. The most players, or the most awakened at questionable times, planted them everywhere: near the lake, in front of the LAC Space, at the turn of an alley. Some wear a bonnet of the festival, when others show a smile too wide to be honest. Frozen in the fog, they give the impression of judging queues, waiting for the midnight session or participating in the competition. Ghost jurors, still, perfectly in the tone of this third day.
And while they watch, impassive, the day unfolds its program: the rooms open, the lights turn off, and the films of the selection, or not, begin to demand their share of attention. The fog can swallow the city, it is now on the screens that the clearest visions will emerge.
Mother
Johanna Moder signs a film that starts as a late dream of parenting before turning into an identity nightmare. Between the clinic too smooth, the doctor too perfect and this baby with whom the bond refuses to weave, everything breathes the felted discomfort. Mother auscultes motherhood as a role that one puts on a woman, even denying what she really feels.
Under his intimate drama, the story slides towards a domestic thriller where visions, paranoia and guilt intertwine until blurring the boundary between instinct and delusion.
In this edition, the link is clear: the mask is that of the « good mother », this imposed role that she tries to end up to the crack. When suspicion settles (is it really his child?), the film becomes dry, tense, almost clinical, dissipating conflicting injunctions and social pressure that infiltrates in every gesture.
Not revolutionary in its form, but carried by remarkable visual intimacy*, the film unfolds a chilling precision in its way of showing how a social mask can close up until it becomes a real psychic cell. And when this imposed role, that of the ideal mother, begins to crack, Mother reveals what he really says: the slow suffocation of a woman who is asked to love before even understanding what she is living.
Gérardometer : 🎭🎭🎭🎭🎭
* Between the precision of the Super 35 sensor of the Alexa 35, the mastered sharpness of the Ultra Prime, the flexibility of the Alura zooms and the assumed organicity of the Petzval, Mother's Baby regains the density and breathing of the 35 mm in a digital box.
The Ultra Prime sculpt a clean and contrasting image, the Aluras ensure unbroken focal variations, and the Petzvals infuse living matter.
The chief operator plays these textures with an almost visceral intuition. He lets the Alexa 35 open in its dynamics, modulates the optical softness or roughness according to the emotion, and summons the Petzvals when the image must palpitate, breathe, exist.
Each plane then seems to be born with the fragility and strength of a first breath... that of Mother, which finds in this technical alchemy its most intimate identity.
The Weed Eaters
Transforming weed into a vector of cannibalism and fully assuming its barred concept, The Weed Eaters condenses his smoking idea into a small black irony bomb... as if Ken Loach had put himself in the lead of shooting an episode of Master Chief anthropophagic version.
The staging, dry like a throat after a bad joint, plays on the contrast between social realism and carnivorous slippages. And in the midst of this chaos, British humor, the real, the one who keeps the phlegm even when someone loses a piece, infuses every scene. The film treats absurd as a formality, cannibalism as a mere setback, and lets the spectator laugh despite himself, caught in this so British shift where no one seems to find the situation so strange.
Touched by the theme « Get off the masks. » of this 33rd Gérardmer Festival, The Weed Eaters reveals what lies behind the facades: a society that devours itself, a country where social appetite ends up becoming literal, and where horror reveals what everyone preferred to keep sealed.
The result has something of a poorly dosed trip* It's low, it bites hard, and it leaves a taste of satire in the mouth.
In short, a small British UFO who rolls his shovel with absurdity and crucifies society with full teeth. A B series that knows where she goes, even when her characters don't know what they eat anymore.
Gérardometer : 🎭🎭🎭
* In The Weed Eaters, the weed whispers in your ear that salad is terribly common and that steak has never done its cake.
A taffe, and here you are to contemplate a rib with the fervor of a gentleman who discovers a late vocation for the slaughter.
They say: « Meat is strength; vegetables, it's the decoration ». Here, it is especially the weed that explains very calmly that everything that breathes is a culinary opportunity.
So yes, « Against drugs, everyone can act »... Especially when the next breath risks turning you into a culinary explorer of the neighborhood with the politeness of a hungry butler.
In The Weed EatersThe real threat is not the plant... This is this very British moment when you realize that you are salivating and that you are already apologizing for the arm you are about to taste.
The Thing With Feathers
Preferring deaf tension to the effects, Dylan Southern refuses to be abhorrent to his drama of mourning. The film observes a family fractured by loss, and how this absence infiltrates every gesture, every silence, until it becomes almost palpable. We're thinking about Mr. Babaook for this way to materialize pain in space, but here the fear is evacuated: remains only a mild, persistent malaise, which tightens the throat without ever screaming.
Benedict Cumberbatch carries the film with a magnetic restraint. He embodies a man who advances as if he were afraid of awakening something within him, a being whose apparent mastery allows to filter out brilliance of fragility. His play, all in microtensions, gives the narrative an emotional density that the staging accompanies without ever highlighting it.
The choice of the 1.33 ratio reinforces this impression of interior choking. The square frame acts like a box too narrow, a visual mask that forces the character to confront what he tries to hide. In the context of « Get off the masks. », this device finds an obvious resonance: the film does not seek to tear off the mask, but to show how it cracks.
In the end, The Thing With Feathers impose as an intimate, tense drama, where pain never manifests frontally but permeates every plane. A narrow, precise film that prefers the truth of emotions to the mechanics of thrill.
Gérardometer : 🎭🎭🎭
Silence
With Silence, which is part of the continuity of Skins and The PietàEduardo Casanova continues his cinema of bodies exposed, sometimes literally, always symbolically. The film examines social exclusion and AIDS not as subjects, but as visible scars, stigmas that society would like to cover with a varnish of modesty. Casanova rips off this varnish. Put off the masks, really.
His vampires, central figures of the narrative, embody this radical nude. Being condemned to live on the margins, eternal bearers of a difference that one fantasizes as much as one fears, they become the perfect metaphors of the identities that one stigmatizes. Their immortality is nothing glorious: it is a survival under surveillance, an existence assigned to shadow. At Casanova, the vampire is not a predator, but an excluded among the excluded.
Its pink aesthetic, coming out of a pastry nightmare, always as corrosive, functions here as a revealing: under the soft fake, all screams marginalization. Characters, like echo chambers, make everything sound, even what is not said... for silence becomes a protest.
The film thus finds an obvious echo with the theme of the festival, since this is precisely what Casanova does by exposing the faces that society prefers to hide... HIV-positive, excluded, « inadequate »And here vampires reduced to their otherness. In him, monstrosity is never in the bodies, but in the eyes that judge them. The mask falls, and what appears is not horror, but truth.
In less time than it takes to get used to its baroque universe, Silence imposes an obvious: Casanova does not film marginals, he filmes those that the world has tried to mask. And he reveals them with fierce tenderness.
Gérardometer : 🎭🎭🎭🎭
🌫️ Parenthesis in mist: the returning and the freezing
After this salve of visions, it is time to breathe again. The rooms are empty, the discussions continue on the frozen sidewalks, and familiar faces reappear as if the mist had simply put them on a break. Gérardmer has this talent: re-emerging old knowledge at the turn of a queue, a heated hall or an improvised glass. A few words exchanged, a memory of past edition, and everything reacts as if nothing had moved.
It also reminds me of Joko Anwar: between two sessions, a parenthesis opened, almost softly, as a refuge in the middle of the tumult. The retrospective paid tribute to him with this intensity peculiar to Gérardmer, where family secrets, derailed traditions and homes that breathe stronger than their inhabitants find an immediate echo. A brief but busy stop, which recalled how naturally his cinema interacts with the DNA of the festival... And why he keeps haunting the rooms long after the credits.
And when you come out at night, you already feel that the festival is preparing a new trap: ice. A fine sneaky film that turns each sidewalk into a rink and promises one day 4 slippery, unpredictable, perhaps a little cruel. Anyway, pure Gérardmer juice.
🌱 Day 4: Under the snow coat, the talents still grow
The fourth day of the Gérardmer Festival opens without any weather breaks... progress. The cold remains there, faithful as an over-motivated figure, and the piled snow still borders the sidewalks like a decor that no one has thought to disassemble. But for once, Gérardmer does not try to test the thermal resistance of festivalgoers: he simply reminds them, discreetly, that winter did not sign a truce.
And so much the better, because this Friday marks the beginning of the Competition Short Films, this moment when the festival changes pace not by accelerating, but by densifying itself. We feel the day tightened, as if the films themselves were on guard: short format, long ideas, and a room that fills with the enthusiasm of an audience who knows that everything can happen in about twenty minutes.
🧪 Competition Short Films — The pot of the shorts: it already ends
A session that the regulars would not miss for nothing in the world: this moment when Gérardmer becomes a launching ramp, a test ground, a laboratory where often the first gestures of filmmakers that will count tomorrow are revealed.
This year, the selection had high-voltage nursery appearances: varied, sharpened, surprisingly mature. There were voices that looked for, that dared, that already claimed a leg. The narrative mastery strikes from the outset, the visual proposals show disconcerting assurance, and the worlds, sometimes already very marked, announce filmmakers who do not intend to remain in the shadows.
The audience loves this session: it's a dry debate, it laughs nervously, it applauds loudly, and it comes out comparing the favourites like Panini cards. A real edition barometer, and this year, the needle clearly points to a generation that arrives with the hooks.
✨ Tribute to Olga Kurylenko — When emotion pierces the varnish
Very moved on stage, Olga Kurylenko offered Gérardmer a rare suspended moment of those who recall that behind the icons of cinema there are trajectories, ripples, deep fidelities. She speaks of France as a « my country », with a sincerity that crosses the room like a hot wave in this month of January refrigerated.
The ceremony, elegant without being crushed, unfolds the speech of Neil Marshall, which had directed him in Centurion, and a series of extracts that the actress welcomes with light modesty. We feel a real gratitude, almost palpable, for this festival that celebrates both monsters and artists who embody them.
And in this edition placed under the sign of « Get off the masks. », difficult to imagine a fairer tribute : Kurylenko does not play, she reveals herself. No posture, no distance, just an actress who claims her journey, her choices, and this intimate bond with a country that saw her grow as an artist.
And as if that wasn't enough, she stays to present Alter Ego, surrounded by his two directors, Nicolas & Bruno. A perfect transition to talk about today's film programming.
Junk World
There are films that come to the theater like wandering dogs: barking, noisy, not really polite, but with an energy that forces respect. Junk World belongs to this family, one that prefers inventiveness to varnish, chaos to comfort, and that transforms debug into aesthetics.
The carbide film has a logic of total recovery: DIY decorations, ideas thrown like bolts in a machine too fast, characters that seem to come out of a post-apocalyptic vacuum. And yet, it holds. Better: it lives. We feel behind each plan a desire for cinema that far exceeds the means, an almost childish pleasure to assemble pieces of nothing to make a whole world.
It's not always elegant, sometimes even frankly blond, but it's precisely what makes it so charming: Junk World advances with the conviction of a film that has nothing to lose and everything to prove. And in a competition where many seek mastery, chooses brute daring, instinctive gesture, poetry of waste.
And if we really had to look for a connection to the theme « Get off the masks. », it would be there: in this refusal of makeup, in this way to assume every apparent seam, every rafistolage, as if the film claimed its own vulnerability. Nothing to hide, everything to show.
A little dirty wind... And it feels good. Now I'm gonna have to find out. Junk Head.
Gérardometer : 🎭🎭🎭
Redux Redux
There are films that claim their B-series status as others brand a banner, and Redux Redux is clearly one of those. No cynicism, no second degree forced: just a frank pleasure of the genre, held by a director who knows exactly where she is going. Where so many productions Netflix appear to come out of an industrial mould (same light, same cutting, same vacuum playaturgy), Redux Redux breathes singularity, human hand, decided gesture.
The film advances with an almost old-school precision: sharp framing, tense rhythm, assumed practical effects, and this way of building a universe without apologizing for its limits. You feel the director in love with his references, but never prisoner of them. It's a B series of SF that doesn't try to pretend to be more than she is... and this is precisely what makes it better than many productions « premium » that are exhausting to look important.
And if we want to see an echo to the theme « Get off the masks. », it is there: in this total transparency, this refusal of varnish, this way of assuming its identity without seeking to disguise itself as blockbuster. Redux Redux Don't hide anything, don't make up anything, and it is in this honesty that the film finds its strength.
A work that recalls that the B series, when held, thought and loved, can still slam many of the so-called more prestigious productions.
Gérardometer : 🎭🎭🎭🎭
Alter Ego
Some comedies simply align situations, others take the risk of looking their characters straight into their eyes. Alter Ego clearly belongs to the second category. The film plays with absurd, but never for free: every comic slip reveals a small piece of truth, a dead angle that characters preferred to leave in the shadow. This is what had already seduced Alpe d'Huez: a finer writing than it looks, a sense of rhythm, and this ability to make laugh without sacrificing the human.
Casting is one of the engines of the film. Actors have fun, and it can be seen: everyone finds their register (quiet irony, the excess perfectly controlled, the sincerity a little left) and the whole works like a well regulated comic mechanics. No overplays, no blinks leaning: just performers who understand that humor works better when it rests on characters, not on numbers.
And then there is this central idea, simple but fearlessly effective: to be faced with a version of self that we never wanted to face. Not a mix of genres, but a game on registers, between soft satire, psychological mirror and comedy with concept. This is where the film naturally finds its place in the theme « Get off the masks. ». Here, masks fall without a break, sometimes despite the characters, sometimes with relief, but always with a sincerity that surprises.
Alter Ego makes you laugh, laugh a lot, but above all, he observes. And in a landscape where comedy too often just ticks boxes, that look makes all the difference.
Gérardometer : 🎭🎭🎭🎭
🌙 End of day — When the night takes over the frame
The night falls on Gérardmer and, with her, this familiar feeling of having crossed several worlds in a few hours. We laughed, we startled, we raised an eyebrow, sometimes all three at the same time. Alter Ego brought his thoughtful lightness, Redux Redux its series B energy held like a banded arc, and Junk World his poetic chaos that still sticks to the soles. Three films, three gestures, three ways to recall that genre cinema is never as alive as when it assumes what it is... and the ever more audacious Short Film Competition just confirms it.
And I go into the night, the heart still vibrant.
Under the watchful moon, another day waits.
To the one who will recognize himself, thank you for the challenge launched softly: dragging an Alexandrian in a festival report might not be necessary... But admit it's always more fun when I'm pushed a little bit. For the penalty, you even had two for the price of one.
☀️ Day 5: Discovered in the light, the festival holds its breath
The fifth day opens under a clear sun, almost too frank for a festival that had become accustomed to talking to us in precipitation. The snow retreats in silence, leaving behind damp edges and sidewalks that shine like freshly developed film. Gérardmer finally breathes, and festivalgoers with: walk slower, look up, even surprise yourself to enjoy the light. The terraces, suddenly full as halls at the first session, rustle with an enthusiasm found: chairs scraping the ground, open coats, faces facing the sun like a projector.
This lull gives the day a special tone. We are no longer in climate survival, nor in the euphoria of the beginnings: this is the moment when everyone takes stock. Conversations get tighter, opinions become clearer, certainties sometimes crack. We compare, we re-evaluate, we defend our favourites with a conviction that is no longer hypothetic. And this year, a rare luxury, the Gérardmer Festival does not stop tonight: an extra day awaits the most enduring, a last window to catch up with the missed films, to see a heartbeat, or simply prolong the pleasure.
For the time being, the city slowly slides towards the Palmarès ceremony. We talk about it everywhere, but without fever: a calm, almost elegant tension, as if the sun had polished the nerves. The queues look like improvised editorial rooms where everyone tries to guess what the jury has retained, or forgotten. I'll come back later, once the winners are announced.
Meanwhile, the day runs its last sessions with an unexpected sweetness. We take advantage, we complete, we refine. The festival enters this strange area where everything is still possible, but where you already feel the swing.
And now, place for today's movies... Those who have accompanied this light and who also deserve their moment of light.
Cadet
Adilkhan Yerzhanov continues with Cadet his exploration of the shadow zones where authority is lost and where men turn into workings of a system that crushes them. The film clearly convokes the old Soviet spectra: absurd discipline, authoritarian verticality, archaic belief in violence as a training tool. Nothing really disappeared, everything just fossilized. Yerzhanov filmes this contamination of the present in the past as a slow radioactivity, embedded in walls and bodies.
The result is a theatre of degenerate masculinity where the boys, barely out of childhood, are trained as war dogs. They can be seen sliding, almost mechanically, from the status of students to soldiers, then soldiers to monsters. Yerzhanov observes this process with a clinical coldness, without emphasis or pathos, which sometimes gives the impression of attending a real-time autopsy. But this drought, which could be a force, ends up turning empty: the darkness becomes monotonous, the hammered word loses its impact, and one surprises himself to hope that the film also removes its mask to reveal something other than an already known finding.
Under the theme « Get off the masks. », Cadet Check all the boxes: it rips off that of heroic manhood, that of the protective institution, that of glorious patriotism. It shows what's behind it, and it's not good to see. But Yerzhanov sometimes seems so fascinated by the ugliness that he exposes that he forgets to question her. We come out of the film with the impression of having crossed a long disciplinary corridor where each door leads to the same room.
In short, Cadet is a coherent, rigorous, haunted film... but also hermetic, repetitive, and too satisfied with its own darkness. The ghosts he summons are there, but they end up out there. And this is precisely where an involuntary parallel arises: it is often said that the past never dies, but Cadet reminds above all that he can come back haunting the living with a heaviness that any literal spectrum would envy them. In this game, the J-Horror of the early 2000s did much better: at Nakata or Kurosawa, the curse was crawling, insinuating, contaminating. At Yerzhanov, it falls like an administrative file forgotten since the USSR: heavy, grey, inevitable.
Gérardometer : 🎭🎭
Cold Storage
Cold Storage is part of these films that look at each other with immediate pleasure, almost guilty, but leave behind them a diffuse impression of product too well packed. We feel the oiled mechanics, the narrative designed to work on the quarter turn, as if each scene had been calibrated to keep the spectator in permanent comfort. Even the promising biological threat seems to be constantly on the leash.
The film plays with horror, but never agrees to pay the price. At each rise in tension, a trait of mind comes to defuse the moment, as if the work feared to become truly disturbing. The humor works, of course, but it acts as a circuit breaker: it protects, it reassures, it prevents emotional contamination. As a result, you often smile, you rarely shudder.
There is an effective, rhythmic B-series entertainment carried by an endearing duo (Joe Keery de Stranger Things), but it lacks boldness. The film touches on exciting themes (scientific responsibility, fragility of human infrastructures, fear of the invisible) without ever sinking into them. Everything stays on the surface, as if Cold Storage preferred foam to deep current.
The presence of Liam Neeson introduces a striking shift: it brings a raw intensity that the film, lighter in its DNA, never really absorbs. In a few scenes, he installs a gravity that seems to belong to another Cold Storage, darker, more tense, almost fantasized. This density creates a friction of tone, most certainly assumed, and it is regretted that it does not spread more in the rest of the story.
As for David Koepp, who here adapts his own novel, we recognize his narrative effectiveness and his sense of concept, but also some caution. He polishes his material to the point of erasing what could have made it a rougher, more dangerous, more memorable work.
One might say that the film resembles its mutant organism: fascinating to observe, but contained in an airtight box. Nothing overflows, nothing really contaminates.
In the end, a good film, nice, well tied, but never looking to get out of its safe area. A microbiological thriller that prefers the wink of the eye to the thrill, and which, by wanting to please, ends up not really scoring.
Gérardometer : 🎭🎭🎭
Back to Silent Hill
Adapt Silent Hill 2 In the cinema, it was to attack a monument whose strength rests precisely on what escapes, on what guesses rather than on what appears. The game is a psychological gulf, a labyrinth of guilt where every silence weighs heavier than a dialogue. Back to Silent Hill treats this material with respect, but without achieving its depth. The film seems animated by a sincere desire to do well, while encountering a form of caution that prevents it from fully embracing the darkness and ambiguity of its model.
What strikes first is how the story is fragmented. Flashbacks, omnipresent, constantly interrupt the progress of the story. They emerge as explanatory crutches, seeking to shed light on what the game deliberately left in the shadow. Instead of thickening the mystery, they dispel it. Instead of digging the character's psyche, they comment on it. This mechanics ends up breaking the dramatic momentum, preventing immersion, as if the film feared that the spectator would not understand the stakes without being told. Then we find ourselves facing a work that explains too much what it should allow to infuse.
Yet, the visual universe has a certain outfit. The city, its distorted silhouettes, its almost alive mist, all this is seriously restored. One feels a desire to reconnect with the imagination of the game, to find this peaty atmosphere where each corner seems to breathe the threat. But this fidelity remains on the surface. It reproduces without reinventing. It summons the symbols without restoring them the emotional or symbolic charge that made them so powerful. Anxiety comes out, but never settles out, as if the film hesitated to give up at slowness, unease, discomfort.
The staging also oscillates between application and restraint. Some plans show a true understanding of the codes of psychological narrative, but the whole lacks boldness. One guesses what the film would like to provoke, a vertigo inside, a gradual descent into guilt, without it actually getting body. The result is clean, sometimes even elegant, but rarely inhabited.
As for the characters, they exist more as functions than as presences. The main actor manages to transmit a form of haunted fatigue, but his emotional path is constantly interrupted by the rhythm breaks imposed by the scenario. The secondary figures, however, seem to float around him without ever finding their place, as if the film did not dare grant them a real density.
Thus, Back to Silent Hill leaves a mixed impression. The film is not devoid of qualities, and it feels at every moment the respect brought to the original work. But this reverence turns into a brake. By seeking to make clear what in the game was a matter of trouble and unsaid, the film loses an essential part of its soul. There is still an honest, sometimes touching adaptation, but it never manages to reach the emotional abyss of the game it inspires. A descent, yes, but too marked to really swallow us.
And when we come out of it, almost in spite of ourselves, we think of the first Silent Hillalready signed Christophe Gans, to this adaptation which dared to opacity, strangeness, hypnotic slowness. A film that did not fear losing the spectator to better possess it. Perhaps this is where we have to go back: to this more rough, visceral entrance door where we agreed to get lost without being held hands.
Gérardometer : 🎭🎭
Dolly
Films that don't knock on the door sometimes come across: they kick it, camera on the shoulder and strong granularity in ambush. Dolly is one of those. From the first few seconds, we understand that he does not seek to modernise horror, but to re-incarnate it: in 16 mm, sweat, dust, flesh. Grain is not a style effect, it is a declaration of intent. We find this grated, almost abrasive texture, which immediately evokes the seventies and immense shade of Massacre with chainsaw. Not a shy tribute, but a frontal gesture: Dolly Don't quote, he breathes craspec cinema.
The story, yet simple (a young woman kidnapped by a creature who wants to raise her as her child) becomes under Rod Blackhurst's camera a ritual of pure tension. The film never seeks to intellectualize its device: it assumes, the greenhouse, the wrong, until it becomes a sensory experience. Where so many contemporary productions are lost in irony or overexplanation, Dolly advances with brutal, almost primitive sincerity. We're not here to understand: We're here to survive.
The staging, an almost animal precision, constantly plays on proximity: tight frames, nervous movements, a camera that seems to breathe at Macy's pace. The 16 mm amplifies everything: pores, shadows, tremors, silences. It's like every shot could break between your fingers. This apparent fragility gives the film a rare strength: Dolly is not afraid of being ugly, being grotesque, being excessive. He knows that horror often arises from what overflows.
And then there is Dolly herself, a monstrous but strangely touching figure, incarnated with destabilizing intensity. Not a simple Boogiey(wo)man, but a presence. A mass of contradictions: maternal and terrifying, grotesque and tragic, almost mythological. The film never seeks to psychologize her, and that is precisely what makes her fascinating. It exists as a block of instinct, an archetype that would have come to life in a celluloid nightmare.
Actually, it's hard to imagine a film that talks more frontally about the idea of falling the mask. Dolly finds an almost disturbing resonance. The film does not simply reveal a monstrous face: it exposes the very mechanics of emotional lie. The creature makes a role, that of mother, as one put on a mask too tight, and the whole film consists of watching this mask crack, deform, and then fall. What surprises you is the way Dolly manages to be outrageous without becoming free. The film pushes the sliders, yes, but always with a form of internal coherence, a logic of black tale. We feel the influence of the New French Extreme (James Quandt hello), of Martyrs to Border(s) passing through Inside, but filtered through a more narrative, more structured American sensitivity. The result is a strange, visceral hybrid that looks like nothing else in the current landscape.
We come from Dolly with the impression of having seen a film that dares: dare matter, dare deformity, dare simplicity, dare emotional violence. A film that does not seek to please, but to mark... To slap... Leave a trace.
And this may be Blackhurst's greatest success: remember that horror does not need to be clean, smooth or conceptual to be powerful. Sometimes it's enough for a monster, a trembling camera, and a beating heart.
Dolly is not just a tribute: it is a reminder. A reminder that horror, the true, turns with blood, grain, and fierce conviction.
Gérardometer : 🎭🎭🎭🎭
🏆 Awards Ceremony — Faces naked, candid words
The list of the 33rd edition of the Gérardmer Festival was closed with an impression of lucid gravity. Mother won the Grand Prix, confirming the festival's appetite for stories where the fantastic slips into the loopholes of everyday life. A film of suspicions, of double backgrounds, of motherhood under tension, which imposed itself as evidence in an edition in which the intimate ceased to crack under the pressure of the world.
But the image that will remain, the one that went through the ceremony like a shock wave, is the speech of Nadège Beausson-Diagne. On stage, fist raised, assumed symbol of struggle and resistance, she spoke about racism, violence, the need for « repair the world ». She recalled that the fantastic is not a refuge but a mirror, and that the monsters that they film must never make forget those that exist outside. The room rose from a single movement, as if the air itself had been charged with electricity. It was no longer a speech: it was a moral deflagration, a reminder to order addressed to an environment that sometimes likes to think of itself as sheltered behind its fictions.
A few minutes earlier, Philippe Rouyer, faithful to his critical elegance, brought to the ceremony the clarity and verbal precision that characterize his public interventions, recalling how his sharp look has long accompanied the fantastic Gérardmer.
• Grand Prix : Mother
• Jury Prize : The Weed Eaters
• Jury Prize : Cadet
• Award for Criticism : Cadet
• Public Prize : Redux Redux
• Jury Youth Award : Donate Leave the Kids Alone
• Grand Prix du Court Métrage : Exsanguina
The last day will open tomorrow with this strange clarity: the fantastic has spoken, but the world too. And we must now move forward with naked faces and words that no longer tremble.
🫀 Day 6: The ultimate beat, somewhere between the fog and the scene
Last day, last lap. After five days led drum beating, this Sunday took on a welcome deceleration look: only one session on the counter, like a decompression airlock before the ultimate appointment. A breath, almost a luxury, before Gérardmer closes his fantastic parenthesis.
Flush
Flush One of those cinematographic objects that seem to be born of a counter joke before revealing a rigor of almost mathematical staging. The film is based on a concept so radical that it immediately becomes hypnotic: a man, cocainoman, his head stuck in a Turkish toilet, condemned to face an entire night in the deserted basement of a bar where every noise, every shadow, every memory goes up like a bubble of air in a blocked siphon. This extreme closed session, which could only be a gadget, turns into a real psychological echo chamber. The decor doesn't move, but everything trembles. The tile becomes an arena, the bowl a metaphysical trap, and the character a gladiator of the absurd, forced to negotiate with his own decay.
The strength of the film lies in its unlikely balance between grotesque and gravity. One laughs, yes, but a nervous laugh, almost guilty, as if one were witnessing the falling of a man who touches the bottom... and discovers that there is still a floor below. The high concept is never treated as a simple find: it structures the narrative, imposes a rhythm, creates a continuous tension. The director exploits every square centimeter of the decor with an inventiveness that constantly surprises. Variations of light turn the toilet into purgatory, tight framing becomes torture instruments, and ruptures of tone prevent any comfortable installation. We think we know where we go, then the film rotates, slides, derapes, as if the narration itself loses balance on a soil too wet.
Jonathan Lambert delivers a performance that far exceeds the style exercise. He plays a man literally stuck, but inwardly in perpetual motion. His face, a prisoner of ceramics, becomes an emotional landscape: shame, panic, lucidity, rage, everything circulates. He manages to make a character who, on paper, could have been just a pathetic clown. Here, he becomes a toilet Sisyphus, a shipwrecked man hanging on a bowl like a lifebuoy.
Under his corrosive humour, Flush talks about the spiral of addiction, the shame that sticks to the skin, the family that has been let go, the possibility, or illusion, to rise to the surface. The film shoots at the fakes and exposes a man reduced to the essential, forced to look in front of what he has fled too long. It's a comedy, yes, but a comedy that hurts, stinks, leaves a mark. A comedy where the head in the bowl does not prevent you from having clear ideas, and where touching the bottom is paradoxically becoming a form of rebirth.
Flush is a rare gesture of cinema: bold, nervous, inventive, and above all perfectly assumed. A closed camera that is not lacking in depth, a film that turns an absurd concept into a visceral experience, and a brilliant proof that one can make great cinema with a tiny space, a determined actor and a crazy idea pushed to the end.
Gérardometer : 🎭🎭🎭🎭
🏵️ Closing Ceremony: Under the sign of the first times
The evening took on the look of a historic event for this 33rd edition. The ceremony was held in the presence of the minister delegated to Rurality, Michel Fournier, who came to salute the importance of the festival for the mountain territories and the local cultural vitality. A notable political presence, which gave the evening a special relief... As if the fantastic, the space of a moment, became a state affair.
But the real novelty was the bold choice of concluding not with a film, but with a play. For the first time since the creation of the festival, the final curtain fell on The Monster Maker, revisited by the Geromese company Bodies in Voice (a creation set in record time), ahead of more than 500 spectators at the LAC Space.
A stage bet raised hand-in-hand: an artistic gesture that prolongs the DNA of the Gérardmer Festival while opening up to other forms of narration. An elegant way to remember that the fantastic is not limited to the screen, it slips wherever the imaginary finds a scene, and is not afraid to change skin.
🦸🏻♂️ The real heroes: 600 volunteers and zero superpowers
It is difficult to close this book without greeting those who, in the shadows, make it impossible: the 600 volunteers mobilized for six days. Their energy, patience and ability to absorb the unexpected form the true backbone of the festival. Without them, no fluid lines, no rooms ready on time, no logistical magic.
The fantastic is also this: an army of discreet hands that transforms potential chaos into controlled experience.
🤱🏻 Motherhood, this beautiful monster
Along with the pattern of masks, it is impossible to ignore the insistent, almost haunted presence of motherhood in programming, which explored this intimate, visceral, sometimes monstrous territory, where love and terror merge. And the list only confirmed this trend.
Gérardmer 2026 will have recalled that the genre knows how to speak of our origins, of our first fears, of this primal bond that shapes us... and sometimes chases us.
This year, the monster had a cradle!
🎬 Clap
This 33rd edition ends as it has lived: with panache, some audacity, and this particular atmosphere where the whole city seems to vibrate at the rhythm of the stories that pass through it.
Last night at the restaurant The Detour where Nepalese dinner at Paddington time, a last greeting, and already the impatience of returning to walk the corridors, the halls, the drunken nights and the passionate discussions that make Gérardmer a separate territory.
The festival is shut down, but its shadows persist. On MaG, they will still find material to deploy: artists' lyrics, background articles, critical videos.
See you next year.
I clicked on the article to take a quick look at the charts and I finally read all about it so much that the atmosphere of the festival was well described, it made you feel like you're next to it.
Definitely a beautiful feather!
Thank you.