Taxidermia

Tracing three corporeally fixated generations of a family through the respective filters of sexual frustration, gluttony and, yes, taxidermy, György Pálfy’s faintly surreal, determinedly gross second feature (after ‘Hukkle’) plays out like an extended pun on ‘stuffing’. We open, towards the end of World War II, at a farmhouse where soldier Morosgoványi is reduced to peeping at the girls and a masturbatory regime that lets off not just steam but jets of flame. Decades on, his porcine son Kálmán is a rising star of Hungary’s competitive-eating circuit – think Mr Creosote in a leotard – vying with a rival nosher for his beloved. And, in the present day, Kálmán’s loner son Lajos is an animal-stuffer who is developing his own cadaverous body, along with some ideas that would even test Gunther von Hagens. Based on Lajos Parti Nagy’s short stories, ‘Taxidermia’ undoubtedly has its own unsavoury humour and gratuitous shock value, but its extremities and enormities yield less than the sum of their dismembered parts.