« I don’t want to make love, I want to be eaten alive. »

Sadie (Tirion Healy) struggles to find a balance between her work, her social life, and her erotic fascination with insects. With Insectasy, Angus Silver offers a disturbing film about entomophilia. A film presented as a world premiere at Fantasia that will leave many viewers in a troubled state.

Sensual or disgusting?

Angus Silver signs a feature film that partly acts as a tribute to 70s erotic thrillers with a quirky sense of dark humor and a purplish color palette, as well as a modern film about the sterility of contemporary life. With this work, he walks the fine line between sensuality and grossness. From the opening scene, things quickly shift to eroticism, with Sadie listening to a recording that sits somewhere between personal development and pornography, then we find her on her bed, naked, pleasuring herself. Then, the camera moves closer to show us a jar, placed upside down between her breasts, with an insect crawling on her skin. Then comes the orgasm and the jar falls, and the insect is crushed at the peak of her pleasure. Ah right, that part is a bit more disgusting.

Thus the film unfolds. Between these moments when Sadie gives in to her impulses and those when she tries to fight them, the film plays with the sensations of the viewer who wonders whether they should be turned on or disgusted. The actress delivers a solid performance in a clearly not obvious role.

Between sleep and wakefulness

Insectasy deploys erotic transgression as a weapon to tear down the sterility of contemporary life, plunging the viewer into the sensory and unusual inner world of its character. Between extravagant dream sequences that disrupt Sadie’s daily routine and an evocative soundscape, the film finds a formidable footing. The score by Tom Cepeda and The Rats that Drink Blood — enhanced by a few compositions by Solange Nelles — perfectly matches the narrative: a rhythmic pulse with insectoid echoes constantly pulls the audience backward, echoing an equally whimsical voice-over.

By blurring the boundary between sleep and wakefulness, by diving headfirst into the viscero-repugnant, Insectasy examines Sadie’s deep solitude with a poignant universality. Without ever explicitly naming it, the feature film establishes itself as a post-pandemic work where anxiety, precarity, paranoia, and isolation permeate every frame. It’s a universe saturated with sex, where characters discuss their intimacy with a disconcerting banality, like mere echoes of TV soaps or podcasts. A verbal overabundance that, paradoxically, ends up sweeping away true eroticism, raw desire, and its destructive charge.

A little more…

Films with strange, even abnormal eroticism are a dime a dozen. But those that place the insect at the center of human desire, that is much less frequent. Strangely enough, the director and his lead actress manage to make this deviance almost acceptable.

I’m even left wondering if there are people who actually live this reality. In any case, it was deemed necessary to give another official meaning to the word « entomophile » to describe people who feel sexually attracted to insects. I guess we shouldn’t judge.

On the other hand, what I can judge is Insectasy, a film worth checking out for the beauty of its imagery, its ability to transgress norms, and for offering a cohesive story that keeps the viewer wide awake. And that will get people talking.

Insectasy is screening at Fantasia on July 24 and 27, 2026.

Trailer