Nice effects though.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

David Cronenberg never changed. His predominant themes, although increasingly mature in exposure and direction, ring unchanged through time. "Stereo" is no exception. Shot without sound and just scientific mumbo-jumbo serving as a narrative Cronenberg explores the very essence of his obsessions: sexuality and degrees of human interaction with a typical cold and calculating manner. The story based around a scientific experiment by the Academy for Erotic Inquiry into inducing psychic communication through sexual relation, delves into issues so essential to Cronenberg's body of work. Certain ideas brought about are abundantly distributed around future movies, such as one man drilling his own forehead to release the voices ("Scanners") or an approach to detachment oddly reminiscent of "Dead Ringers".In all essence "Stereo" is a pseudo-scientific elaborate. Psychic communication is brought about be proximity - without any social setting and relationship between two human beings psychic connection is just noise, only through closeness does this evolve to something more conscious, subliminal. However overly increased proximity causes loss of self or a growing sense of detachment from your own I. Such messages, rife with psychological context rummage throughout the movie, making it a somewhat fascinating and necessary experience for any Cronenberg aficionado, helping understand his future work. Nonetheless this aseptic experimental movie with long austere shots and little in terms of plot burdens the viewer to a degree that a loss of focus is almost a given, whilst a fast forward button seems a welcome option, despite its roughly 65 minutes runtime. Tiresome, but intricate, Cronenberg opened his career with an intriguing insight, but lacking any interest in viewer satisfaction, basically a self-indulgent crash course into issues evolved in his illustrious career.For me personally "Stereo" was pure torture, but the intellectual content is pretty evident (whilst being a definite overreach typical for overzealous film students) and anyone aiming at writing a thesis on Cronenberg should definitely start off with this intricate quasi-documentary.

Cronenberg's first feature is a bizarre, distended thing, whose real star is the location. I'm guessing we're looking at York University campus; regardless, every obscure tableau he stages is self-consciously dwarfed by the forbidding institutional architecture that houses it. The sporadic voice-over that occasionally rises from the silence suggests that we're watching a narrative about a sexual telepathy clinic whose mandate goes seriously awry. If you concentrate, you can see how this relates to the on screen shenanigans in a linear and probably even preplanned way - it's not just precious mannerisms, although it is that as well. The film makes the most of its visual material with a special thing for fisheye pans, and it runs free love through a dystopian sci-fi wringer in a way that will be familiar to fans of his later work, even including a giveaway throw to "Scanners". But after a while it does get tedious, and while Cronenberg's iconoclasm remains enjoyable and felt, minimalist sci-fi on no budget was always easier to pull off in print than on screen.

2nd viewing. Alongside "Fast Company" on this fine Anchor Bay presentation are Cronenberg's first two experimental low-budget science fiction features, both filmed on a University of Toronto site in Scarborough, Ontario. I'd seen the first, Stereo on a poor-quality bootleg years ago and am pleased to report that not only does the film hold up to a 2nd viewing, the transfer is quite fine. The voice-over narration to the silent-shot black-and-white footage certainly lends some verisimilitude to the pseudo-documentary conceit of an experimental psych lab devoted to telepathy. Various colleagues of the para-psychologist Luther Stringfellow discuss his experiments and theories and how they bear out in a test group of young subjects apparently capable of various ESP abilities; we watch characters wander around alone or interact with each other individually or in small groups, and their strangeness (in particular one young vampirically-dressed man of rather odd visage) alternates between a sort of normal weirdness and something....else. Are they in fact gifted? Is the narration actually in sync with what we are seeing? Watch it and find out; uncommonly fascinating, if somewhat obtuse. Worthy of comparison with Greenaway's early pseudo-documentary shorts.

While this rare student film of Cronenberg's was certainly a pleasure to come across, it sure as shoot didn't offer much for pleasure or entertainment period once actually viewed. Designed as a "faked" B & W, voiceover-only documentary on the extra-sensory/psychic abilities of a group of young subjects in an enclosed secluded laboratory, with the big problem being that "faked" documentaries on any subject generally manage to make themselves entertaining by being either funny (as was the case with "Spinal Tap," "Waiting For Guffman," "Fear Of A Black Hat," etc.), or disturbing/disgusting/scary/whatever (i.e. "Blair Witch," "The Last Broadcast," "Snuff," etc.) Unfortunately this film didn't seem to try to take any sort of emotional approach to the material--it didn't even have any of the nauseating gore & makeup effects characteristic of his later films like "The Brood" and "The Fly"--and thus simply managed to be tedious and unrewarding.While it is enjoyable to see some of Cronenberg's early stock actors at work here (some of whom would later have smaller roles in his later films), and the subject matter for the film is an obvious precursor to his later "Scanners," ultimately the darn thing will probably do little more than offer the completists out there some rather unenthusiastic bragging rights. Whatta snooze!