Taxidermia is the goriest, most disturbing and most disgusting film I have ever seen, yet is one of the greatest feats in 21st century movie-making. It is dark and repugnant, but very deliberately so. It is not at all self-indulgent, although it might seem that at first glance. However, 30 minutes into the film one cannot help but realize that all this gore is meant with purpose, that this sickening texture of coherence is what gives this satire its peculiar authenticity. L'art pour l'art gruesomeness really gets my goat, but in this case everything falls into its right place. Although I got physically sick watching it, I have to admit I am an admirer of Taxidermia.
We see three generations of men from a strange family: an army orderly obsessed with one-sided sex, his son, an acclaimed speed-eater, and an animal preparator. They are all peculiarly abnormal in their own ways but so is everybody else in the twisted world Gyorgy Palfi has created. But we all know that however deviant a world is on screen it merely is a reflection of our even more deviant everyday life. What Palfi tries to put across is that in our society sick is not even sick any more, dementia is not dementia any more, and we are ready to accept any defect or corruption of mind as long as they serve the self right in his quest for creating something new, something with which he can stand out from the crowd even more. Search for the inner genius justifies everything.
