Favours (2024) by Agnes Skonare

Sonja, 25, is stranded at a busy train station with a baby she insists isn’t hers — but as panic rises and skepticism mounts, the question shifts: is she telling the truth, or is this a mother in full denial?

Favours is an enigmatic, ambiguous short with many layers packed into just 11 minutes — anxiety-ridden, deliberately frustrating, and designed to leave audiences with questions rather than answers. Its festival circuit — Göteborg, Palm Springs, AFI Fest, SIFF — placed it at the centre of international short film conversation. The film explores themes of identity crisis, motherhood, and the inability to say no — a premise with mass emotional resonance that travels across cultures. Garance Marillier’s casting, fresh from Raw and Titane, gave the film instant cinephile credibility.

Elements Driving the Trend: No single character is a reliable narrator — the ambiguity is structural, not incidental — which keeps audiences replaying the film’s logic long after it ends. Director Skonare, a Columbia University graduate whose work consistently features characters struggling to adapt to foreign places and cultures, brings a precise, international sensibility to an inherently local scenario. The train station setting — multilingual, anonymous, indifferent — amplifies Sonja’s isolation perfectly. At 11 minutes, it is built for festival programmes, streaming discovery, and social sharing.

Virality: Letterboxd and short film communities drove strong organic discovery, with Marillier’s fanbase amplifying the film globally. Its reputation as “heart-pounding, sexy, surreal, and sinister” spread fast across film social platforms.

Critics Reception: Letterboxd community consensus called it brilliantly acted, nerve-wracking, and deliberately uncomfortable — a short that uses a simple premise to open deep psychological territory. Festival programmers consistently highlighted Marillier’s performance as the film’s standout asset.

Awards and Recognitions: Special Mention for Best Live-Action Short 15 Minutes and Under at Palm Springs International ShortFest 2024. Minimalen 2024 Festival Award; Castellinaria International Festival of Young Cinema 2024 Audience Award. 3 wins and 8 nominations total.

Favours lands at a moment when short film is experiencing a genuine cultural renaissance — driven by streaming platforms, Letterboxd culture, and festival visibility. Its ambiguous maternal premise connects to a broader wave of films interrogating motherhood without resolution. For the industry, the film is a calling card for both Skonare and Marillier. It proves that 11 minutes, one location, and a single unanswered question can generate the same cultural noise as a feature.

A growing wave of short and feature films is placing women in impossible situations where their credibility is structurally questioned — and Favours distils that premise to its purest form. Is the baby really abandoned, or is Sonja the mother in denial? — the film never answers, which is exactly the point. The unreliable narrator has always been thriller’s most effective tool; applying it to a woman and a baby in 2024 carries immediate social charge. The single-location pressure cooker format — perfected in short film — gives the premise maximum intensity with minimum resources.

Trend Drivers: Short Film as Psychological Thriller Laboratory The short format has become the most agile space for high-concept psychological premises that features would dilute across 90 minutes. Göteborg International Film Festival’s Swedish Shorts Competition and Palm Springs ShortFest both programmed the film — two of the most competitive short film platforms globally — validating its formal precision. The casting of rising genre actresses in short films is creating a new pipeline between arthouse genre features and the short circuit. Marillier’s presence signals a film built for a specific, informed audience.

What Is Influencing Trend: The post-Raw / post-Titane wave of feminine body horror and psychological thriller has created an international audience primed for films that centre women’s inner states as sources of dread. Short film platforms — MUBI, festival VOD, Vimeo — are giving formally ambitious shorts genuine distribution reach for the first time. The ambiguous maternal narrative is emerging as one of short cinema’s most fertile premises.

Macro Trends Influencing: The broader cultural conversation around maternal ambivalence — amplified by Peau à Peau, Tully, and the postpartum horror wave — is creating a receptive context for films that refuse to idealise motherhood. Gender and identity discourse has made the “is she a good mother?” question a live cultural tension rather than a simple moral judgement. International co-productions between Nordic countries and France are generating a distinct short film aesthetic with strong festival appeal.

Consumer Trends Influencing: Letterboxd and short film communities are driving discovery of formally ambitious short cinema at unprecedented scale. Audiences aged 18–35 are increasingly treating short films as standalone cultural events rather than programme fillers. The appetite for films that provoke without resolving — deliberately withholding closure — is growing across platforms.

Audience Analysis: Genre Fans, Feminist Film Audiences, and the Garance Marillier Faithful The core audience is 18–35 — genre-literate, festival-aware viewers drawn to Marillier’s previous work and to psychological short cinema. The film is cheeky and profound — intense enough to leave audiences thinking, disturbing enough to leave them questioning what they just watched. The maternal ambiguity premise gives it emotional reach beyond the arthouse circuit. Anyone who has ever been disbelieved by a system that should have helped them will find something unsettling and true in Sonja’s predicament.

Favours works because it trusts its audience to sit inside the discomfort without resolution — which is exactly what the best short films do. The trend it represents is accelerating: short cinema as a space for formally radical, high-concept premises that demand repeat viewing and generate genuine conversation. For the industry, Skonare is a director to watch and Favours is the film that announced her.

Agnes Skonare delivers a debut short of remarkable formal control — a single-location thriller that uses unreliable narration, a charismatic lead, and a deliberately unresolved premise to generate genuine dread in real time. Marillier is extraordinary: panicked, persuasive, and perfectly calibrated to keep the audience guessing. The film’s refusal to answer its central question is not a weakness but its most radical and honest choice. Favours is the kind of short that makes you want to watch everything its director makes next.

Audience Relevance: For Anyone Who Has Ever Been Told “That’s Not Your Problem” Sonja’s desperation is instantly legible — a woman in a system that won’t help her, surrounded by people who won’t believe her. Whether she is telling the truth is almost beside the point.

The film’s real subject is institutional indifference — and every viewer who has ever been dismissed by a bureaucrat, a bystander, or a train station information desk will feel it.

What Is the Message: Credibility Is a Privilege Not Everyone Gets The film explores the impossibility of being believed when you most need it — and the panic that follows when the system simply will not engage with your reality. Sonja is not judged by the film; she is judged by everyone in it — and that gap is where the horror lives.

Whether she is the mother or not, the film’s real question is why no one around her is willing to help regardless.

Relevance to Audience: A Train Station as a Trap The public space — busy, anonymous, indifferent — is the film’s most effective co-star. Sonja is surrounded by people and completely alone; visible to everyone and believed by no one.

That dynamic — maximum exposure, minimum support — is a social reality the film translates into pure genre tension.

Social Relevance: Maternal Ambivalence as the Last Cinematic Taboo The film’s central ambiguity — is there another mother, or is this Sonja’s baby? — leaves the question deliberately open, refusing to moralize or resolve. In doing so, it treats maternal ambivalence as a legitimate, complex emotional reality rather than a pathology to be explained.

That refusal to judge is the film’s most politically significant gesture.

Performance: Marillier Carries Eleven Minutes Like a Feature Garance Marillier proves again why she is one of the most fearless actors working today — physically committed, emotionally volatile, and entirely believable in every register of Sonja’s escalating panic. Eva Johansson and Amalia Holm provide the skeptical world Sonja collides against.

The entire film lives or dies on Marillier’s face — and she delivers completely.

Legacy: A Calling Card That Announces Two Careers Favours establishes Skonare as a director with a precise instinct for psychological tension and formal economy — exactly the qualities that translate from short to feature. It also confirms Marillier as one of the defining actresses of her generation in European genre cinema.

Both careers to watch. This is where they announced themselves.

Success: 3 Wins, 8 Nominations, a Festival Circuit That Said Yes Minimalen 2024 Festival Award; Castellinaria International Festival of Young Cinema Audience Award 2024. Palm Springs International ShortFest Special Mention. Göteborg International Film Festival selection. IMDb user rating of 7.1. Released October 9, 2024 in Sweden.

A short film with 3 wins and 8 nominations across competitive international festivals is a significant achievement — and positions both director and star for the feature landscape immediately.

Favours is eleven minutes of controlled, deliberate discomfort — the work of a director who knows exactly what she is doing and an actress who never stops believing it. For a short film, that is everything.

• Movie themes: Maternal ambivalence, credibility, institutional indifference, and the panic of being disbelieved. An 11-minute pressure cooker about a woman the world refuses to help.

• Movie director: Formally precise short film debut. Agnes Skonare — Columbia University graduate, Swedish-French co-production — demonstrates a tight instinct for psychological tension, single-location drama, and unreliable narration.

• Top casting: Marillier carries the film entirely. Garance Marillier (Raw, Titane) delivers a physically committed, emotionally volatile performance that makes every second of the 11-minute runtime count.

• Awards and recognition: 3 wins, 8 nominations. Palm Springs ShortFest Special Mention; Minimalen Festival Award; Castellinaria Audience Award 2024. Selections at Göteborg, AFI Fest, SIFF.

• Why to watch: One of the best short films of 2024 — a formally precise psychological thriller that asks an unanswerable question and trusts you to sit inside the discomfort.

• Key success factors: Unreliable narration plus Marillier’s fearless performance plus a deliberately unresolved premise — a combination that generates more tension in 11 minutes than most features manage in 90.

• Where to watch: Available on MUBI. Released October 9, 2024 in Sweden via Pine Productions.