Fantasia 2026 Review: INSECTASY, Are You Into Bugs?

Sadie is horny. Really horny. She has let real life, either working at the walk-in-clinic as a receptionist, or hanging out with her friends, fade into the background like radio-static, only half awares and mostly filtered out. She only thinks about sex and bugs. Sex reinforced via the whisper sultry podcast she always has in her ear, and insects through the brightly lit macro-cinematography, extreme close ups of creepy crawlies peppered through the film. She can only get herself off by having crickets walking on her bare skin at the penultimate second, or three, before orgasm. (It is notable that the word bug can also mean mania.)

 

She has presumably worked out the details on self pleasure, her kink, by containing the insects in an upside down bell jar to keep them from scurrying off. We see her also work out the details to keep upping the species bar via the both pet store owner and the employee, Honey, who has the hots for her. 

 

There is a sense of practicality and fantasy on display here, that lets us into the minutiae of how not only Sadie feels (her headspace) but also in how she manages to order her life around her own personal indulgences, copes, and escapes. When not dreaming about sex and death, eros and thanatos (deviously intertwined in the human condition, said Dr. Freud) she knits furiously. This is a superb sexual repression visual. One with its own kind of tactile allusions to the spiders web. Seeing her later wearing garment she was working on futher underscores the pupa-state she is currently in. 

 

Angus Silver's perfectly portmanteau titled, Insectasy, seductively blends loneliness and sexual confusion towards eventual (delightful) transgressive acceptance. The owning, as it were, of one’s proclivities, to give into nature, and to transform into the beautiful butterfly that we all ought to be. 

 

Cinematically, the film is nestled in the microscopic centre of a Venn diagram consisting of Peter Strickland's Duke of Burgundy, Dario Argento's Phenomena, and Guy Maddin’s ethereal 8mm sexual frenzy-danger-shame of Careful; with just the slightest nod towards ASMR-adjacent work of Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani (Amer, The Strange Colour of Your Bodies Tears).

 

This is a small marvel on such a modest budget. Which the film makes up for on its own kind of yearning enthusiasm and long looks full of lust and secrets. Sadie initially bucks her dark nature, “I do not want to make love, I want to be eaten alive,” and her storybook fantasies of knight and princess notions, with rather banal hetero- and homo-sexual encounters involving humans in her limited social triangle of work, pet shop, and smoke breaks behind the clinic. These are by design the least interesting parts of the movie, but set up and intellectualize (Do ants labour because it feels good to, or because it feels bad not to?) what is in actuality the pure amoral instinct; the beating heart of the film.

 

Insectasy is held together with a pitch-perfect, oddly subtle, performance of Tirion Healy, who has the gift of imparting everything the audience needs to know about Sadie’s whiplash states in how wide her eyes are held for the camera. Rarely have peepers done such heavy lifting for the duration of a film, and it is a joy to watch Sadie on her sexual journey entirely through her face, often in close-up. Couple that with Tom Cepeda’s and Solange Nelles' ear-worm compositions, and gentle evocation 1970s Euro-sleaze, while being completely its own original DIY Canadian thing. It is most definitely worthy of anyone's self-exploration.