Sadie (Tirion Healy) is a young English woman working as a receptionist in a small medical practice. Surrounded by banal friends and irked by her clients’ hypochondria, she frequently retreats into a “brown study” of naturalistic fairy-winged fantasy.
She constantly listens to a sexually charged ASMR podcast and masturbates fervently with crickets and cockroaches. As Sadie becomes consumed by insect-induced orgasms, the rest of her frustrating life becomes nothing more than troublesome tinnitus.
Utterly ravenous for this niche gratification, she seeks out wilder, more decadent methods and exotic species to enhance her creepy-crawly carnal cravings. Sadie is about to find out that obsessions of this magnitude can either rescue you forever or grind you to dust.
Kudos to Fantasia for smuggling this delirious low-budget banger from director Angus Silver into their film festival. I doubt it would have cleared customs in many others.
Deliciously dead-pan and downbeat, it’s a pungent cinematic sink-hole that pronounces promiscuity deceased by strangulation at the hands of societal oversaturation. An oversharing sexual wasteland where paranoia has trumped passion and social media distorts and manipulates expectation levels.
In Sadie’s stale existence the most exciting sex gets is when a condom bursts during a soulless bathroom encounter. A rupture no doubt due to the skeletal remains of one of her spiny insect “friends”, a scenario extrapolated later in the film to excruciating effect.
While Sadie embraces her kink as emancipation from the unhealthy shackles of modern sexuality, others find her specialist brand of libertarianism perverse. While they’re over-stuffing their lives with trite melodrama and reverse-engineered empathy, she is over-stuffing her vagina with anthropoidal raptures.
As Sadie’s sexual fixation deepens her patience becomes exponentially shallow and her mask of cool detachment begins to slip. She drifts away from the moorings of mundane reality, swamped by relentless resolve and hyper-focused ingenuity—the grubby hallmarks of wholesale addiction.
In one scene pet shop assistant Honey, a human subject of her erotic desires, tells Sadie that “women cannot be perverts“. Sadie fancies this woman, more for her association as insect pimp than any conventional attraction one suspects, yet lets this assertion hang in the conversational air, unwilling to jeopardise her secret insect harem.
Tirion Healy excels as Sadie. She exudes the acting equivalent of dry ice in a lead performance that evokes both the beauty and beguiling aloofness of Alphaville (1965) era Anna Karina. It’s a challenging role that leaves her physically and emotionally exposed but she wraps herself in a camouflage of calm that germinates the films anti-kink shaming ethos.
Director Angus Silver’s mischievous movie is largely unique but it owes a significant cinematic debt to the erotic euro-thrillers of the 1970’s. Projecting its dreamlike steamy sexuality and left-field melodrama onto a backdrop of slacker mumblecore and post-pandemic PTSD.
A more modernist comparison would be to the sensorially tactile work of Peter Strickland (The Duke of Burgundy) as well as the intimate cineliteracy of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani (Reflection in a Dead Diamond).
Insectasy is an impressive calling card from Silver with a killer score from Tom Cepeda and The Rats that Drink Blood and Solange Nelles. A frequently outrageous, unashamedly gross shot across the bows of judgmentalism with a shocking denouement for the ages.
★★★★
World Premiere at Fantasia Film Festival on the 24th of July 2026 / Tirion Healy, Lyndall Huber, Jan Roeth, Emmett Roiko, Kelsey Thompson / Dir: Angus Silver / Foggy Ocean Pictures
Discover more from
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
