Just Philippot's Acide | Acid (2018)

A seventeen-minute short. At first we see an abandoned teddy bear by the roadside, then the lower sections of cars as they bump into each other. As it rains, the teddy bear begins to dissolve a little, as the camera moves out we see a man with a much bloodied face, and rotting cars in a traffic jam. It's now dry and a motorbike seems to be on fire: it carries the mother (Maud Wyler), the father (Sofian Khammes) and their son (Antonin Chaussoy). The father stops the motorbike in a field and the three alight and run towards a house which a number of other people are running towards, although they see that the owners of the house, in a frenzy, are shooting the people down.

The rain is obviously deadly acid, and as the family run the man picks up a corrugated sheet for his wife and son to shelter from while trying to escape. The man begins to bleed heavily as it starts to pour down, and he doesn't make it to the cave where his wife and child are sheltering. Here mother and son take off some of their poisoned clothing, they look at the rain dripping inside the cave and suspect that that too is acid. The mother appears to be dying and the boy walks out into the sunshine, into the devastation, the screen goes black and he says a few times: 'Il y a quelqu'un?" ('Is anyone there?'). This film, made three years after Ses souffles, is far more like the horror genre that his first feature La Nuée will be, although the presence of mother and child is also there as in Ses souffres.