Lunacy

FROM THE LINER NOTES

The latest provocation from surrealist master Jan Svankmajer (Alice, Little Otik) deliriously combines live action, stop-motion animation, kinky sex, Euro-trash violence, black comedy, and lots of frisky meat puppets. In nineteenth-century rural France, a young man named Jean Berlot becomes caught up in the nightmarish world of a mysterious, decadent Marquis (Jan Triska, The People vs. Larry Flynt): orgiastic black masses, “therapeutic” funerals and an asylum with a smorgasbord of macabre “treatments” and tarred-and-feathered doctors. Described by Svankmajer himself as a “philosophical horror film,” Lunacy is loosely based on two short stories by Edgar Allan Poe and inspired by the works of the Marquis de Sade.