Very brief but very efficacious film, this short by Guillaume Bréaud. 'Je suis ton châtiment' (I Am Your Punishment) is both entertaining and well-made. It tells the story of a solitary young man, too influenced by the cheesy terror movies he goes to see, who decides to turn into a serial killer but fails desperately. Guillaume Bréaud does not meed more than seven minutes and a half to parody low quality horror films (reconstruction of horror scenes in black and white or in color, original posters for these invented Z movies by Marc Brucker), to sketch a portrait of his pathetic hero (a man alone, who has never been able to communicate with others and who finally breaks away) and to create a convincing thriller (complete with assault on an old lady, hunt for the murderer and shocking ending). Boasting an over-the-top performance by Denis Podalydès, perfect as the loner adrift anti-hero, "Je suis ton châtiment" can appear as a kind of digest of Lang's immortal masterpiece 'M', not unworthy, relatively speaking, of its model.
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