Inside a tiny cosmetic studio tucked away in Beirut, faces are numbed one injection at a time.
The camera never moves, the bed never shifts, and the woman performing the procedures, Bouba, remains mostly turned away.
In Omar Mismar’s A Frown Gone Mad, the frown isn’t just a wrinkle to be smoothed; it’s a symptom, a signal, and, perhaps, a site of resistance.
Oscillating between contemporary art and essayistic observation, Omar’s debut documentary feature, currently showing at the Regional Competition of the Golden Apricot International Film Festival in Yerevan, Armenia (July 13-20), is not your typical festival contender.
Its quiet yet deeply visceral setting, centred entirely on a small aesthetics salon offering Botox and fillers, immediately unsettles many viewers, Omar admits.
“People said it was hard to watch. Especially those afraid of needles – they had to cover their eyes,” he says. “But then, interestingly, some said that over time, they began to feel numb, just like the clients in the film.”
This numbness, both literal and metaphorical, sits at the core of Omar’s concept. Trained as an interdisciplinary and conceptual artist, he often begins with a philosophical inquiry rather than a medium.
This time, it was Susan Buck-Morss's essay titled Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art’ Reconsidered that sparked his thinking.
In it, Susan suggests that in a modern world flooded with sensory input and trauma, aesthetic experience turns into anaesthetic: a numbing of the senses.
Omar latches onto this tension: “Botox became a lens through which to explore how feelings are mediated by the face,” he explains. “Paralysis isn’t just physical; it interrupts the feedback loop between emotion and expression. If I’m angry but unable to frown, the anger itself might change.”
Emotional paralysis inside Beirut’s Botox room
His hypothesis takes visual form through long, static shots of women and men’s faces being slowly numbed with Botox.
The injections become metaphors for the everyday violence of life in Lebanon – a place still reverberating with the aftershocks of the 2020 Beirut port explosion, political and financial collapse, the Gaza War outburst in 2022, and overall social trauma.
In such a context, voluntary paralysis becomes a paradoxical act of control.
The titular term 'frown' takes on symbolic weight. Bouba, like many beauticians, uses it diagnostically – she instructs clients to 'frown', 'raise', or 'smile' to see which areas need injections. But Omar sees more than just surface tension.
“The frown is an expression of dissatisfaction, of resistance, of anger. In Lebanon today, it feels like we've exhausted those feelings. There’s a numbness, an apathy. Botox becomes a symptom of this collective state, but also a response to it.”
Filming began in September 2023, and by the second session in Bouba’s salon, October 7 had already happened.
“That’s why the film is haunted by the idea of the war in Gaza,” Omar says, “but also by the possibility of the war extending to Lebanon.”
Eventually, the war did extend after filming had wrapped. But its spectre lingers across the film’s otherwise minimalist frame, emerging through overheard conversations and passing remarks.
“There’s a kind of narrative, maybe the only arc in the film,” he explains. “It starts with Bouba asking me, ‘What do you think? Is there going to be war in Lebanon too?’ And I say, so confidently or naively, ‘No.’ Then I ask her the same, and she also says no.”
But that certainty unravels. Clients begin worrying, obsessing. Bouba reassures them that even if war comes, they can keep coming, as her business will not stop.
The fragmented timeline eventually folds in an explosion involving a journalist speaking of a colleague killed, and references to the 2020 port blast.
“You almost don’t know which explosion we’re talking about or what time frame we’re in,” he adds.
This temporal and emotional instability becomes another form of anaesthesia – a cultural fog where past trauma, present anxiety, and mediated violence blend into each other.
For Omar, this connects directly to the cosmetic impulse.
“There’s a constant instability – political, military, economic,” he says. “Everything is slipping away. So the face becomes the last frontier, the last battlefield where one can reclaim control.”
When aesthetics turn political
Bouba, whose work is targeted by the state – as if there were no more pressing issues in the country, as she herself suggests – welcomed Omar into her workspace without hesitation.
“She was incredibly open,” he says. “She talks about being studied and about doing this for years, and how the state only pretends to care about legality in this specific field – as if this is the only form of corruption.”
Indeed, the entanglement of cosmetic culture with systems of power runs deeper. Omar points to the role Lebanese banks once played in promoting plastic surgery loans in the early 2000s.
“You’d see billboards advertising loans for rhinoplasty or fillers – $5,000 just to get a nose job. And people took them,” he says. “It feels like a beauty regime was forming, one in which the banks, the state, and media were all complicit.”
This artificial empowerment – giving people a sense of agency over their appearance while controlling the means – reminds him of Walter Benjamin’s argument about fascism: granting expression without rights or substance.
“It’s not necessarily that the state is interested in beauty per se, but it’s convenient to pacify people with the illusion of control, especially over their own faces.”
Seen in this light, aesthetic interventions become deeply political acts – both as instruments of pacification and as potential sites of resistance.
“Maybe it’s time to rethink this regime,” Omar reflects. “To find a way to re-frown, to re-introduce anger, to shake the stagnancy we’ve been living in.”
Roles in cosmetic imagination
Despite her centrality, Bouba is rarely shown from the front, and we hardly see her face. The limited space of the salon dictated this decision initially, but it eventually became an aesthetic and narrative principle.
“There was barely any room to set the tripod,” Omar recalls. “And she hated the camera. She says it in the film while doing Botox for a client who says she loves being on TV, and Bouba replies, ‘I hate the camera. It doesn’t suit me.’”
It was an unspoken agreement: the work could be filmed, but Bouba would not perform.
The media, too, plays an implicit yet powerful role in shaping the cosmetic imagination.
Omar reflects on a moment after the 2020 port explosion: “A few days after the blast, I saw a billboard. I can’t remember if it was already there or newly put up. But it showed a typical Botox clinic before-and-after image, right as the city was covered in glass shards.”
The juxtaposition stuck with him.
“This pristine, glossy, media-generated idea of perfection, set against total devastation – it felt grotesque. But also revealing. Maybe we can’t separate media imagery, cosmetic procedures, and real, physical violence. Maybe they exist together.”
Even beyond Lebanon, Omar sees this phenomenon replicated across contexts.
“The media plays a huge role in imposing gendered norms, almost always targeted at women, with Euro-American beauty ideals: wide eyes, tiny noses, big lips. That’s the base layer. But I wanted to add another one: that maybe these procedures are also a last attempt to regain control when everything else is out of our hands.”
The surreal and poetic
The film, composed with minimal cinematic movement and a single vantage point, still manages to open up vast conceptual terrain.
Omar layers the footage with surreal intermissions – short bursts of text-based musings and social-media-like clips.
Some are taken directly from Bouba’s WhatsApp stories, where she advertises her procedures with slogans like “We bombed the prices.”
Others are original creations: poetic, melancholy lines that suggest scrolling through a feed while dissociating – “I have lost sensation, but pain found me.”
“I wanted them to feel like digital ephemera,” he explains. “These poetic outbursts mixed with Bouba’s very real, very grounded content.”
The final edit was a discovery process of its own.
“At some point, I knew I had to stop filming and look at what I had. For me, filming was like taking notes, while editing was the writing,” Omar explains.
One early cut included a voiceover throughout.
“The voiceover that you hear at the end was originally scattered between scenes. But I realised I didn’t need it. Everything I wanted to say was already being expressed by Bouba and the clients through their conversations.”
That includes moments of levity and melancholy that border on the surreal.
One woman says she visits the salon not only for the treatment but for therapy: “I come here feeling down, and Bouba gives me her touch so I become the queen that I am.”
Another remarks, “Everything shall be fine once the plastic surgery loans are reinstated” – a reference to real loans offered by Lebanese banks to fund cosmetic procedures.
“It’s almost surreal, right?” Omar says.
Resistance in the face of control
In the film’s final act, a voiceover tells the story of a marionette who begins to resist the strings that control her.
The 'marionette lines' of the face – creased lines at the edges of the mouth, often treated with fillers – become symbols of control and expression.
“Closing those lines might stop you from moving your jaw,” Omar says, “but maybe that’s where you gain agency. If no one can move your mouth for you, maybe you start speaking on your own.”
For Omar, the goal was never to offer a binary take on aesthetic interventions, pro or anti, but to unpack their emotional and political undercurrents. In a world where trauma accumulates faster than we can process it, the desire to smooth over pain is deeply human.
“We’re not just freezing wrinkles,” he says. “We’re freezing our ability to show that we’ve had enough. And that’s dangerous.”
Mariana Hristova is a freelance film critic, cultural journalist, and programmer. She contributes to national and international outlets and has curated programs for Filmoteca de Catalunya, Arxiu Xènctric, and goEast Wiesbaden, among others. Her professional interests include cinema from the European peripheries and archival and amateur films