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(Fantasia Fest 2026) INSECTASY Squashes Its Kinky Premise

By. Michael Fairbanks 

I couldn’t help but think about David Cronenberg’s Crash while watching Angus Silver’s INSECTASY, a quirked-up character study of a woman sexually attracted to insects. Cronenberg’s film uses car crashes, a shocking kink, as a vehicle to unpack deep insecurities within the psyche of an entire generation. It’s not simply an act of spectacle. That was the only sexual urge that could contain these characters. By contrast, INSECTASY is an awfully myopic little bugger. It speaks to a larger issue within the current crop of high concept indies. There’s an icky little hook that can get people into the door of a Fantasia screening, but as it is forced to unfurl into an actual story, it becomes clear that these creatives have very little to say beyond “some people sure are weird, huh?” 

We follow doctors’ office receptionist Sadie (Tirion Healy) through the minute of her daily routine. She deals with annoying patients, flirts with Theo, a guy she shares cigs with outside of work, visits the pet store and of course, masturbates with small bugs on top of her. This general rhythm repeats ad nauseum throughout INSECTASY’s 80 minute runtime, running out of steam far before the crass and obvious final image one might imagine when reading the logline. 

INSECTASY’s visual flourishes nearly convinced me that it might deliver a compelling transformation. For a film about a social outcast, it is surprisingly vibrant. All of Sadie’s usual haunts, even her dreary job, have an inviting look to them. As if the sexual pleasure she derives from her trysts with little crickets genuinely does manage to keep her moving through the day. Whenever near the insects, we’re treated to close ups of their faces as they move through phallic shot compositions. Sadie’s masturbations are never explicitly framed as grotesque, simply the way she chooses to spend her spare time. These creepy crawlies make her feel safe. We’re also treated to the expanses of her imagination through some dream sequences with a hyper colorful Jacques Tati-esque look. These moments present us with a couple of ambiguous figures, including a dead body with a mask shaped like a triangular beak, that never truly coalesce into coherent symbols. Angus Silver clearly hopes that people will want to play within these dreamscapes but his film never really gives us a reason to want to. 

Strange behavior only becomes compelling when a film gives us a reason to understand it. GODHEAD wrestles with that same challenge through a very different lens, trading insects for impossible questions of faith and belief.

Tirion Healy is an amusing, off kilter screen presence but Silver’s screenplay doesn’t give her much insightful material to work with. Sadie is withdrawn and awkward, pushing anyone close to her away the moment they try to get close to her. She’s clearly more attracted to flirtatious pet store employee Honey (Lyndall Huber) than Theo, who begs for her attention at every turn. Perhaps the attraction to insects is simply intended as a metaphor for suppressed queerness but Silver never dives into why that might be the case for Sadie. That would involve giving her an interior life and past beyond her shocking desires. In fact, since the film provides little potential explanation for Sadie’s behavior other than that, its implications are even a bit offensive in their simplicity. It’s a film that seems to ask, “what if you were so gay that you could fuck a bug?”

 

It doesn’t help that no one contrasts Sadie by feeling like a real person. All of the other actors here have an amateur hour stiffness to the affair. They’re not intentionally contrasting Sadie. We’re supposed to believe they’re just regular folks caught in her crosshairs and yet, everyone seems like an alien pretending to be human. This hamstrings INSECTASY’s ability to convey genuine shock. Anyone who is weirded out by Sadie does not sound like they mean it.

Despite its trippy sensibility, INSECTASY does not peek with a memorable catharsis. It reaches an uncomfortable inflection point and then screeches to a stop. Perhaps Silver was unable to imagine the story beyond a moment where Sadie fully actualizes her desires, but since INSECTASY is so short, it is clear that he left a lot of possibilities on the table. Everybody wants to make a film that might superficially inspire the same fascination with the morbid that the masters inflicted upon us, but they forget that the screenplay is the most important piece. Seems like a no brainer when writing a psychological study but, I digress. Without that material, you get a novelty piece like INSECTASY, gasped at by a handful of people in a niche setting and then smooshed into oblivion.   

Weirdness isn't the destination; it's the invitation. UNIDENTIFIED MURDER accepts that invitation by letting every bizarre twist reveal another layer of an unexpectedly intricate story.