Hypersensitive
(2025)

HYPERSENSITIVE 🌲

Animation is one of the most underrated aspects of Canadian storytelling, and director Martine Frossard demonstrates that in her deeply imaginative short film HYPERSENSITIVE, which competed in the short film section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

HYPERSENSITIVE starts off with a young girl suffering a life-altering event where she is left alone to pick up the pieces of who she was as she takes her first steps of acceptance into the life that awaits her.

The question this short film presents audiences with is, when life spirals out of control and you hit rock bottom, how do you build yourself back up?

There’s no one answer.

Being consumed by everything you can’t control is the underwhelming nature of this girl’s journey, and trying to control what you can’t is how things go from bad to worse. That internal battle of hurt and grief is one she can’t just cast aside, and you see the eventual rock bottom moment that leads to her realization that it just is what it is. From that point she lets her feelings be what they are, and instead of forcing herself to be who she was, she lets herself embrace the painstaking emotions of loss and grow through what life has thrown her way. 

This is one of those watches where two people could see the same thing but could interpret it in completely different ways, and neither person would be wrong. At first glance I found myself enjoying the animation more than whatever the story was trying to convey. I couldn’t really pinpoint a meaning behind what was going on, but to me it didn’t matter because I was so caught up in the mystique and cryptic unveiling of this piece of art.

Then on my fifth watch it felt like everything made sense and I connected to it in a way that I was originally blinded to. 

It is an understandable human response to choose to numb yourself to the hurt you feel, but in reality feeling that hurt is the unfortunate path to recovering from it. Life flows the way it wants, and sometimes we just have to ride the wave.

HYPERSENSITIVE is a wickedly enchanting piece of animation that works as a sensory exploration through a blossoming journey of being reborn anew.

Enjoy!

8.3/10 🍿 🎥

Runtime: 6 minutes
Where: The 2025 Cannes Film Festival.

Hypersensitive Review (2025) The Richmond Reviewer -  June 5th, 2024.

#ShortFilm #Animation #Canadian #CannesFilmFestival #Canada