Hunger

The Housemaids filmmaker Negi and artist Bocardo (The Hexiles) transmute the horrors of colonialism into a grotesque phantasmagoria. In 1896 Bombay, an experimental bubonic plague vaccine transforms the Indians used as test subjects into monsters with warped bodies and unknown powers. The British supervisors test and toy with the mutants, and their activities are documented by William Wallace Hooper, an eccentric photographer who calls his camera “the perfect violence machine.” When a starving mutant named Izna joins in the sadomasochistic games at the camps, they turn strangely intimate, drawing out the inner desires of the colonists and their victims alike. Izna is searching for her mother, who taught her that “in our family, monsters are things to be evoked, not feared,” and she comes to embrace her own monstrosity as her hunger turns supernatural. Bocardo’s showstopper art, reminiscent of Bill Sienkiewicz (who draws the cover art), evokes horror with hallucinatory collages, warped faces and bodies, and bloodlike spatters of ink. This is a dark delight. (Oct.)