'Piercing' (2018) – Nicolas Pesce.

Stylish film-maker Nicolas Pesce's triumphantly transgressive thriller proved to be a rather intriguing, scintillatingly S&M-singed, psycho-sordid thriller about a fashionably attired fastidious young man, Reed, (Christopher Abbott) who has long harboured profoundly unsavoury, distinctly morbid fantasies, a fulminating murderous fetish to which he all too willingly succumbs, finally deciding to gruesomely enact this aberrant peccadillo for real! In order to do so he rents a swish, suitably spanky-looking hotel room, hires a call girl, ostensibly to indulge in some outré S&M, and thereafter tersely plans his nefarious evening's activities with devilish detail, even play-acting the diabolical deed in the austere bathroom before she arrives, but all his meticulously arranged efforts are wildly waylaid by the singularly sinister events that brutally unfold following the arrival of Mona (Mia Wasikowska), thereby diabolically deconstructing the old maxim “Many are the plans in a person's heart, but it is the Lord's purpose that prevails!” And pretty, wrong-headed Reed's altogether blackened, orgiastically overstuffed heart is fit to burst! 

There is a scintillatingly stark, frisson-inducingly detached pragmatism to the Cronenbergian couple's increasingly corrupted congress, the exquisitely shot, wickedly voyeuristic, erotically-charged, switch-blade sharp thriller has all the shocking visceral intensity of Miike Takashi, and is flushed to a hot crimson with with the feral, full-blooded sensuality of Almodovar's morbidly mesmeric 'Matador', with, perhaps, an additionally degenerated dash of controversial Teutonic necromancer Jorg Buttgereit! The dangerously duplicitous Mona, her no less exploratory, and contradictory beau Reed certainly make for a divinely decadent pair of wickedly warped midnight movie protagonists, and some might enjoy the liberal pillaging of classic Giallo/Euro-cult themes herein. Nicolas Pesce's penetratingly perverse 'Piercing' is a triumphantly transgressive, teat-terrorizingly terminal trip into the murkier interstices of human sexuality, William S. Burroughs would be proud!