For those in peril: "Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection"

While we wait for the Cannes-premiered The Shrouds to manifest in cinemas, a new David Cronenberg artefact bobs into view. Don't make the same mistake I did, in sitting down to watch Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection over lunch; but do watch, because these three creditless minutes of literally free-floating imagery are really quite something, up there with the best of the weirdness distributors MUBI got onto the UK release schedule in the dog days of the pandemic. For those three minutes, we're invited to consider items that would be a source of fascination in their own right: lifelike 18th century wax cadavers of women, presumably once used for medical or scientific purposes. Some of the dolls are intact, but others are revealed to have vast, gaping holes in their torsos, exposing their innards; this revelation is made all the more unnerving by the fact Cronenberg offers no contextualising information beyond that long and winding title. Have these women been hollowed out by some exterior surgical force, or blown open from within, as with John Hurt in the first Alien? Almost as fascinating and unnerving is what Cronenberg does with his leading ladies, framing them against the ocean - setting them on lilos, as if they were holidaymakers at a Club Med resort - panning up and along their curves like a director of 1950s nudie cuties, and overlaying the image with breathy orgasmic groans that seem to give these women renewed inner life. (The pitch might have been Crash meets Splash.) Don't be surprised if some form of seasickness sets in, even over three minutes, but the whole forms another illustration of why Cronenberg, whose work on paper suggests the iciest of outsider artists, has instead become so beloved among the sicko set for his work on film: Four Unloved Women... proves every bit as strange and troubling to encounter in November 2024, with women's bodies in heightened real-world peril, as the oddities this filmmaker was carving out back in Canada in the early 1970s.

Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection is now streaming via MUBI.