Lunacy is a bizarre movie featuring both live action and animation set in a surreal and horrific asylum.  It is in some distant supernatural past, a man is tricked and bullied by a psychopathic warden and his henchmen.  The plot is hard to follow but it doesn't seem necessary to understand it in order to find something admirable here.  The carnage and weirdness are intense.  It is a film dominated by its dark visual appearance and its menace.  This is an impressive movie in its ability to create nightmarish images and to sustain a feeling of paranoia, but at nearly 2 hours long, it is also hard work.  The animation features a breathtaking array moving dead meat, sometimes dancing, sometimes having sex with other pieces of meat, and sometimes moving around the set.  The noises accompanying these images are particularly disturbing.  While it is possible that the film could be given a coherent interpretation, doing so would be a remarkable accomplishment given the thoroughness with which Srankmajer managed to make the story hard to follow. Clearly, Lunacy will only appeal to people with tolerance for strange and unpleasant depictions of asylums, but it is quite unique.  Recommended if you like the work of the Quay Brothers.

© 2008 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York.

Keywords: animation, dvd, horror