Canadian perversion has always held a firm grip on our self-narrativization, the violent alienation of our national identities always sought after in reconciliation. Most often, this is not a true reconciliation but one that is totally individualized, that answers to our wants for comfort, affirmation, and self-preservation. Angus Silver, director and writer of Insectasy, imagines this via a young office worker, Sadie, and her quest to rid herself of this alienation that consumes her, that inscribes a schism between her and the world she seems increasingly distracted from and perplexed over. You see, Sadie likes to get off feeling bugs crawl across her naked torso, exploding their guts as she cums. Of course, this is a secret, but one she’s desperate to not have to keep. The requisite solitude such a fetish seems to necessitate — it’s lonely, it’s too quiet: can’t anybody understand?
The beauty of Insectasy lies in how its final image recontextualizes the estrangement we very schematically trudge through as the film tries to muster some structure to its psychosexual analysis. This latter point speaks to the film’s biggest flaw: how lacking in a narrative imagination it is, especially when contending with its transgressions. These two intentions are at odds, compressing the curiosity of its perversion into a digestible capsule, unfurling the type of contradiction that’s never interested in problematizing itself. The elephant of contrivance just gets thrown into the corner, ignored and moved on from. But, beyond that thick cake of frustration, which certainly colors the whole ordeal, the final image is staggering, something impossible to not write about.
Our protagonist, Sadie, finally finding her release from this suffocating remoteness, rides Gregor Samsa. It’s likely not Gregor, exactly, but the iconography is unmistakable. This appropriation and flip is an exciting iconoclastic reveling. The shame and expectation of that all too known metamorphosis is questioned as an experiment in both the embrace of kink and the rejection of social expectations, a pointed theme the film underlines again and again as its plotting fails to reconstitute itself without repetition. There are many isolated instances of this beauty in self-acceptance getting its head above the water, treading against the tide of the diagrammatic, all very digital and crude, orchestrating the greatest sense of care in these small moments of unpolished yet euphoric ecstasy. But then there’s a filmic reprieve, too, a dream-state all too familiar. Again, more imaginings that find the shortest route to the signifier, simplifying its own intentions through hackneyed formal juxtapositions. There’s a lot of this mess, so much so that the beauty is something more sporadic than the mundane, which is a fair enough structure for resonance, if only so much of what is clearly attempting to visualize escape and the fantastic wasn’t also lumbering, axiomatic rumination on Sadie’s self-perception and representation. In so many forms, Silver can’t quite break through the visual lineage they work in, finding only glimmers of a total discursion amongst a mostly derivative object.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2026 — Dispatch 3.
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