Fantasia Review: Drink Full, Descend Into the Fleshy Body Horror of 'Corpus'

A horror tale as old as time—a group of pretty young things gather to party at a secluded place in the woods only to have it all go spectacularly and profoundly wrong; you’ve got to fight for your right to party indeed—is given a fresh hot coat of paint in Corpus, a disturbingly sexy new body horror film which just had its World Premiere at Fantasia. Coming at us from intimacy-coordinator turned first-time feature director Corrin Evans and actor slash co-writer Lily Cowles, Corpus feels like a new phase in queer horror—unapologetically fluid stuff that digs around under the skin. And then some. That’s where the fluid comes from, after all.

Set in 1998 the film kicks off in the big city, the one so big they had to name it twice. Nightlife photographer Sayo (Jeff Wahlberg) deals drugs at the same NYC clubs he’s photographing—sometimes even photographing the same people he’s just handed drugs, much to their coked-snorting chagrin. (Never come between a drag queen and their cocaine, dummy.) Still it’s immediate that even if they’re in the hands of a bad drug dealer they’re in the sights of a spectacular photographer, as Evans shows Sayo’s photographs as he takes them by exploding the blackness of the club into vivid gold-tinged slow-motion bursts, like sparkling fireworks set off on the dance-floor—a truly gorgeous visual effect that I could’ve watched hours of in itself.

Anyway Sayo knows everybody and everybody seems to know him, but his city-wide circle-jerk begins to close in on a couple of important figures in his life—for one there’s obnoxious hetero party-boy and big-money-spender Ross (Michael Vlamis, who you might recall as one of the bandit-priests in The Odyssey—he was the hot one). And for another there’s Sayo’s secret ex-boyfriend, a burgeoning movie-star named Vince (Brodie Townsend) who awhile back took off to L.A. to be famous without once looking back Sayo’s way.

Until tonight anyway. Vince’s sudden reappearance in the city strikes Sayo much like a fist across his gorgeous jaw—closeted for career purposes their affair was kept discreet, and so Sayo’s had nobody to talk to about his emotional turmoil (even if Ross does turn out to be a slightly better friend than he seems upon first douche-baggy glance). The raw wound hasn’t healed is the point, and so Sayo is a pretty easy mark when Vince rolls back into his life with an invite to a swank party supposedly full of notable names that happening in a few days’ time upstate.

When the three boys hop in a car and drive that way they end up finding a much, much smaller gathering than promised, though. Not estate-wise—the grounds they find themselves upon are massive, an old-money property of overgrown stone that feels beamed in from the 70s Euro-sleaze of a Jess Franco or Jean Rollin movie. But there are only three people there to greet them—the silver-haired Cata (Ching Valdes-Aran) who owns the place, her much younger girlfriend Billie (Cowles) who used to be a well-regarded photographer, and the sneering third-wheel Wren (Nuha Jes Izman) who doesn’t seem at all inclined to appreciate the sight of three random men suddenly in their midst, no not in the slightest.

So yeah the vibe is weird immediately. (It doesn’t hurt that the film cold-opens with an extremely disturbing scene that lets us know right off the bat that Billie? Real freak.) But as ever with these movies any and all red flags are dismissed or ignored until far too late for anybody to right the ship. Still the lure of Cata’s friendly and generous presence and, to Sayo specifically, the resplendent darkroom and photography collection that Billie maintains, distracts the guys long enough. Also there’s all the drugs. Not to mention the drug that is the overconfidence of a hot straight man like Ross, who can’t spot Wren’s disdain through the haze of her “crazy girl” sexiness which he’s of course immediately convinced he can conquer, no matter the signs. (He is fittingly and rather hilariously a big fan of Culture Beats’ 90s dance classic “Mr. Vain.”)

So even if the soiree is miniscule, everybody has reasons to have a good time. It is, if nothing else, a spectacular one-percenter place to find one’s self in, especially after the dinge and dark of NYC’s 90s club scene they’ve just escaped from—lush and green and old-world expensive, the sort of peace that comes from being able to buy complete isolation. It should be difficult to have a bad time at Cata’s house.

Or so it would seem! Corpus extends a friendly hand but it’s wearing one of those poison-tipped rings on a finger. Revealing itself as an excavation of consent, of what we’ll say yes to and yes to and yes to until we find ourselves suddenly and irrevocably past the ability to say no, what Evans has in sight with this story is the horror of manipulation. Of how easily we can be manipulated by the world’s ever-nefarious carrots-on-sticks, willing to put ourselves into the baddest of bad places because we’ve been told many untrue things, by others and by ourselves.

It’s a deeply fascinating subject for a former intimacy coordinator to make the subject of their first film anyway, especially from this horrific angle that Corpus ends up going about it. This is a film deeply attuned to the intricacies of self-delusion and of regret; of how the only worse enemy than an outside one is the gross voice in ourselves that says it’s what we’re worth. And Corpus manages to do all of this through some supremely disturbing body horror, including the gnarliest mask this side of Hellraiser. As the father of body horror David Cronenberg has long proven it’s always at its ickiest when it’s being kind of sexy—Corpus takes that lesson and runs, and runs, and smashes right over all of the tangled-up good parts we’ve left rotting inside.