Artsploitation, a distribution company hell bent in finding and cultivating the absolutely best, strange, and the most “challenging of international genre films” brings us the long overdue Dutch film Meat. Despite the film’s festival circuit run since 2010, it is just now releasing on Home Video and VOD platforms, nearly six years later. However, don’t let that deter you from watching Meat, a film that is well deserving of a watch for those who can handle a surreal tale about sex with the utmost sexual frankness.
Meat is about a butcher shop owned by an overweight hyper-sexual butcher, played by Titus Muizelaar, who’s interest in flesh doesn’t end with slaughtered animals. The butcher shop is a sexual enclave for his uncontrollable urges. Here he makes advances on his female employees, while allowing other sexual activity within the premises, and partakes in some carnal activity himself. His newest fascination is the young and beautiful Roxy (Nellie Benner), his newest apprentice who’s as quiet as she is mysterious. At first we get the impression that she detests the butcher’s creepy whispering advances,but as we come to realize the butcher might have met his libidinal match.
But when the Butcher is murdered, and Inspector Mann (also played by Titus Muizelaar) begins an investigation, with Roxy as a suspect, the film descends into a strange world of surrealism and dreamlike narrative. It’s almost as if the butcher is the glue that holds the fabric of the film’s reality, crumbling and becoming undone the moment that he passes, a familiar technique used by Robert Altman in 3 Women.
Meat is not for the easily offended, although not bloody, the film features a great deal of nudity and explicit sex. It’s ferociously in your face and an enigmatic ride of the bizarre. The film gives off the feeling that it exists in its own alternate dimension, one perhaps of sexual fantasies confined to the mind. It all feels hallucinatory, yet real and carnal, and very corporeal. The film broods with sex in an honest and frank manner, and one that is less judgmental than it is exploratory and inquisitive. Meat is an epicurean fantasy of the highest quality told through a fragmented narrative lens and brimming with sexual veracity that’ll grip you from beginning to end.
Co-directed by Maartje Seyferth and Victor Nieuwenhuijs, Meat is now available on DVD and VOD. The DVD is available to purchase through Amazon. While Amazon Prime members can stream the film for free, you can rent or purchase through Vimeo, YouTube, and Amazon Instant Video.
Meat has appeared at illustrious festivals such as, Rotterdamn, Sitges, Paris L’strange, and New York International. Visit Artsploitation’s at their Official Website, Facebook, and Twitter.
