It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

A man afflicted with a disease that makes him want to kill and eat people (I'm a "brass tacks" reviewer, so there it is) during intercourse (Gallo) and his wife are headed to Paris on their honeymoon. Meanwhile, somewhere in Paris, another man covers up some ghastly murders his wife (Dalle) commits, due to having the same disease. Gallo's condition is deteriorating. Some other things happen, slowly, that neither the director nor the audience care about, in order to set up the eventual meeting of Gallo and Dalle. Things get ugly right around there.The first scene is haunting and reminds me of the best kind of horror, like Let The Right One In (Swedish version), creepy with what is left unsaid, the damage done by unstoppable carnal need and the lengths a husband will go through to cover up for his wife. I began loving this film.Sadly, though, I didn't feel that way by the film's end. Much of it had to do with Gallo's flat performance, which may be due to the direction or to his lack of actorly ability. Either way it fails in every way when the guy speaks. Particularly bad were the attempts at a back story, which should have just been left out of the film altogether. If you're going to make an arty character study in the horror genre, just do it. Don't throw in awful scenes just to make the film partially coherent, don't CYA, don't bore me with Vincent Gallo attempting to read dialogue. It's just bad, unnecessary, and takes away from any good the film does eventually deliver. That said, there were excellent moments in this film. The scenes with the chambermaid I found to be brilliantly done. We're proved again and again the pliability and vulnerability of human flesh. From the way the camera stares down at the back of her neck as she pushes her cart around, to the way she washes her feet after her long shift. This does really establish a sense of empathy for the victim that is essential (at least for me) to actually being horrified. Denis knows how to create an atmosphere, and capture a feeling stylistically, I'll give her that.Dalle is breathtaking as a woman who is closeted away by her fearful but devoted husband. She shows remorse, but also seems resentful of his attempts to protect her, in one scene ripping up the entire household in an attempt to break out and kill again. He buries the bodies of her victims and then lovingly sponges away the blood from her body. Such an interesting relationship should have spent more time on screen than anything with Gallo having his "headaches."I think this film would have been quite good had the back story just been absent. Does knowing why the afflicted have the disease really add to the meaning and metaphor attempting to be conveyed here? Not at all for me. Everything about the plot seems to be created, and by created I mean thrown in thoughtlessly, in order to have the meeting between Gallo's character and the one played by Dalle. Which ends, given the synopsis I read before seeing the movie, in a somewhat disappointing and far-from-climactic way. Finally we have the couple of scenes that everyone mentions, and let's face it, these scenes are why this movie exists at all. Everything else seems to serve as a vehicle for the long and drawn out disgust-a-thon of eating someone alive whilst having sex. Now, I'm not sitting here aghast at the tastelessness of Denis for including this in her film. I'm a fan of Noe's Irreversible for it's incredibly stark and real depiction of rape in the sickest sense, because it is sick. But there's something about these scenes that is a little too shallow. The director is obviously messing with our heads, but can't quite pull it off. The scene with Dalle is perverse, but hauntingly so, and the scene with Gallo starts off, surprisingly, actually somewhat erotically. However I just can't be convinced these weren't done at least in part in the spirit just to satisfy the weird competitiveness people have for seeing the depths of depravity and/or having the "courage" to face it in their films. Something about these scenes, from at least a directorial point of view, is just less-than-genuine. Sorry, Ms. Denis, but I'm not convinced.

Beatrice Dalle is a hypnotizing presence to me. Clair Denis has an ability to cover and penetrate the skin. She is a Jarmusch who can put his abstract angst in estrogenal terms, with as much cinematic competence. There is a tendency to compare her to Catherine Breillat. That is a mistake we guys make because both see as women. But Brellait is all about damage, the inevitability of damage. Denis on the other hand is about hope as an urge among desperate urges. They couldn't be more different.These two women, Dalle and Denis have an understanding and make something here. It is not comfortable. For many of us, I can imagine it will be destabilizing because this really could be a deep as real pain. This is not a horror movie. It is a love story, like "Realm of the Senses," or "Pillow Book," but instead of allowing us the safety of "watching," it forces us to inhabit the fear of passion.And. And it is from a woman who, for instance, knows that when you photograph skin, it is the movement of hair that matters, and when you get intimate, the hairs must be those finest, those ones that only a lover sees and makes move. Gallo is an intelligent actor. He is unafraid to go to these places. In a way, this is a woman's "Brown Bunny." He helps a lot. In the background are clueless beauties, men and women, who are destroyed, like the cars in an action movie's chase scene.Dalle made this the same year she made "H Story," which I count as one of the purest of film abstractions. It worked in part because she pulled nervous sweat and menstrual blood into those abstractions. Here she does precisely the opposite. She really does need to be celebrated.You may want the much tamer adventures in this domain: "cat People," Or even the lesser "The Hunger."We need to have a way to indicate a commercial airliner arriving that is better than the shot used here — and 100,000 other places. The song over the end credits is a pretty marvelous appreciation of Frank Zappa, whose earliest song provides the title. That music had the same sort of visceral, destructive purity.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Voodoo-practitioner – Afro-French male doctor's sex-toy creature allowed leaving her locked room by a hypnotised curious intruder being consumed during copulating, is overpowered by a strong American happened to drop in into a doctor's house at the timing, who had since then fallen into her footsteps of a thirst for blood and flash during orgasm.A perverted love of "Dracula" mixed with an unstoppable quest for sadist sex of "Frisk", framed with Parisian charm makes this terrific film realistic to a degree of a potential usage by anti-AIDS and pro-obscenity campaigners.Highly recommended.

True the movie was rather slow but it is European and you kind of have to expect that. A movie doesn't need to be about speed anyway, if you just relax and really let the imagery throw, its quite amazing.There was beautiful cinematography if noticed. The blood dripping from the blades of grass in the field Core was using as hunting grounds. The harsh lighting and color use in some of the lab scenes. the fragile jigsaw of brain matter being sliced and dissected in petri dishes. The wall and Core after she has eaten the boy who brakes in. Both were so intense you couldn't help appreciate the experience. The pace of the film was crucial when considering the character development and the slowly dawning knowledge that Core wasn't alone in her insanity, that Shane was falling further into madness too. Both the victims of their own prior experiments. The realization the audience must go throw, that each character is not going to avoid a grotesque end physically or emotionally. That everyone they touch is doomed to walk on a knife edge of danger as Core has and Shane is growing more animalistic and less human by the day. A stunning piece.