The latest provocation from surrealist master Jan Svankmajer (Little Otick) is loosely based on two short stories by Edgar Allan Poe (“The Premature Burial” and “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether”) and inspired by the works of the Marquis de
Sade. In nineteenth-century France (albeit one full of deliberate anachronisms) a young man, Jean Berlot, is plagued by nightmares in which he is dragged off to a madhouse. On the journey back from his mother’s funeral he is invited by a Marquis
he meets at lunch to spend the night in his castle. There Berlot witnesses a blasphemous orgy and a ‘therapeutic’ funeral. Berlot tries to flee but the Marquis insists on helping him conquer his fears and takes his guest to a surrealistic lunatic
asylum where the patients have complete freedom and the staff are locked up behind bars. Described by Svankmajer himself in a prologue to the film as a ’philosophical horror film,” Lunacy combines live action and stop-motion, sex and
violence, grand guignol terror and gallows humor, and a lot of animated meat.
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