A truly puzzling mystery about a curtain surveillance company.

My partner is a Cronenberg fan and this work is courtesy of “son-of-Cronenberg.”  There’s an interesting conversation here to be had about if directorial vision is genetic or not, but I got shusshed trying to have it while the movie was on.

I know as well as anyone that slow, liminal films are totally a thing to gush over.  But they clearly have very different flavours and this one is not for me.  I couldn’t help feeling it was just a terrible knock off of a Nicholas Winding Refn without any of the glorious stylings.

The premise is that some big company is inserting chips into people’s brains that then allows special brain-agent people to inhabit their bodies and commit assassinations.  There’s a lot of Matrix like brain jacking.  A lot of tension around “bleed-through” of the different lives and endless memory games when they come out of possession.

I think most of the titillation is supposed to come out of the body-swap vibes of our main character Tasya inhabiting the body of hot-dude Colin.  Sex scenes are definitely a big part of the film although it’s not always clear what they’re trying to achieve with them, other than sex on film.  Other features are lots of stabby slashing with blood, blood puddles, melty wax bodies and droopy masks.  If you’re creeped out by droopy masks it’s probably got the goods.

Overall, there are lot more questions raised than answered.  For me the biggest of these is what the hell is that company doing anyway?  Sending people into virtual reality rooms where they spy on real rooms and report in detail the types of curtains they have?  Like what is that?  Curtain Creepers R Us?  Why do they need humans to do this curtain ID job – other than the filmic reason of exposing the characters to more sex scenes near curtains?  Venetian blinds, velvet drapes, tab-top… make an algorithm already as you clearly have the in-world technology.  

This will be my main thought whenever this movie is mentioned – what was with all that curtain identification?

J* gives it 2 stars.

PS. There is a great philosophical conversation in it about being married to a worm.