Out of Fantasia Film Festival, Angus Silver’s Insectasy aims for bizarro eroticism, but it neither gets gross and weird enough nor sexually charged enough to arouse the senses. Its sticky 1960s and ’70s aesthetic, from its carefully peculiar zoom shots and visual crackle, rips from the classics such as Dark Argento’s Phenomena (also referencing its insect obsession) and Mario Bava’s Lisa and the Devil. Silver slices up a very clear visual vision that it’s equal parts hypnotic and disheveling. The story escalates from simple curiosity to throbbing, lustful desires that, ironically, never reach beyond masturbatory fantasies and sweaty, wide-eyed quivering. Insectasy‘s script teeters on the edge of complete abandon, but it just as quickly recedes from the abyss of total sexual liberation.
Sadie (Tirion Healy) has a proclivity for masturbating with a bug crawling across her skin. It gives her a physical thrill that she can’t seem to find anywhere else. Her life seems to meander from boredom to obligation without a sliver of delight. She seeks out these flickering, chirping sensations to feel that her life has a purpose and drive. When her appetites escalate, she longs to find someone who possesses the same carnal hungers. During a trip to a pet store, she peruses the insects and catches the eye of a store clerk named Honey (Lyndall Huber). They become sensually entangled, but a sexual encounter leads Honey to make a startling discovery that’ll make even the audience’s skin squirm.
Insectasy‘s perverse tendencies never feel dangerous. Sadie’s unique pleasures walk the line between kink and seductively depraved, but the film doesn’t flip the switch entirely. It’s there in traces, as Angus Silver outlines Sadie’s deteriorating mental state but without fully committing. When the final moment hits, it’s so long overdue that you’re just aching for there to be more that we could have experienced. While the story might leave the viewer thirsty, Silver’s visual signatures leave such a deep impression that you’re left imagining what it could have been like with a stronger, more daring script.
There’s an unfortunate sluggishness that descends mid-way through and nearly stops the film in its tracks. As it vaults into the third act, Silver injects a bit of steam into the tired and trite locomotive to pick up just enough propulsion to get it over the finish line. But by that time, Sadie’s plunge into madness is undercooked and fairly disappointing.
Angus Silver’s Insectasy weaves a promising cocoon of sexuality, base human needs, and loneliness that never hatches. Style and vintage vibes ooze from every corner of the screen, and for that, Silver should be undeniably commended for delivering a film that’s so ’70s, it’s as though it’s a long-lost VHS tape that once sat alongside the likes of Argento, Bava, and Lucio Fulci. It’s tragic then that the story never hits hard enough, bites deep enough, or climaxes well enough to work.
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