In the past year of rape and assault allegations from Hollywood, the last thing the film industry needs is more graphic, disturbing pornography.
And yet the 2018 Sundance film festival has decided to give the world just that. According to Marlow Stern of the Daily Beast, Piercing can apparently be classified as “Sundance’s Kinkiest Movie.” With its “carnival of perversions,” the film focuses on a man whose greatest desire is to “pierce the female flesh.”
Is that extreme enough? According to the film, the answer is no. The opening shows a character who “wishes to butcher” a child, “dangling an ice pick over a colicky baby.” Wait -- is this supposed to be sexual or just straight up evil?
In addition to the child rape film premiered at Sundance, The Tale, it seems like the more artistic side of the movie business is quickly going down the drain into a very dark place indeed.
It should come as no surprise that the main actor, Christopher Abbott, used to be a member of the cast of Girls, Lena Dunham’s raunchy HBO series. His character “has convinced himself that the only way to cast out this demon inside him and achieve true domestic bliss is to capture, maim, and murder a female prostitute.”
Sounds charming.
It gets better: there’s a scene where the supposed victim ends up “violently stabbing herself in the right thigh with a pair of scissors.” Stern wrote in his review, “I found myself tickled by this kinky little divertissement, like a sharp knife trailed across your skin as opposed to a stab in the heart.”
Yikes.
