A film trailer that asks two questions -- "Are you into bugs?" and "Are you a pervert?" -- is a trailer worth sharing.
Angus Silver's perfectly portmanteau'd titled, Insectasy, is world premiering as part of the UNDERGROUND side-bar at Fantasia in a few weeks. This new-ish programme to the festival often foregrounds transgressive sexual pictures, but rarely as beautifully shot as this one, which seems to sit in the perfect middle ground between Peter Stickland's Duke of Burgundy, and Dario Argento's Phenomena, with just the slightest nod towards the 1970s Euro-sleaze homage and ASMR-adjacent work of Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani (Amer, The Strange Colour of Your Bodies Tears).
From the Fantasia International Film Festival catalogue:
"Blurring the line between waking and sleeping life, INSECTASY indulges in the viscerally gross to examine a deep-seated loneliness endemic to Sadie’s experience, but also deeply relatable. Without spelling things out, the film feels like a real product of the post-pandemic world. Marked by isolation and paranoia, the world feels anxious, out of balance.
"The world of INSECTASY is one saturated with sex; people talk about sex almost incessantly, but it lacks in the erotic. Characters discuss their sex lives, there’s a dullness to it; a kind of rehearsed parroting of podcasts and TV characters. The openness belies real eroticism, evading real or even destructive desire. Sadie’s interior world, not unlike Séverine’s in BELLE DE JOUR, breaks down barriers and acts as a disruptive force against the status quo. As Sadie, Tirion Healy gives an eyes-first performance that is reserved, trembling with interior violence. She conceals below her cool exterior an unbridled lust."