Lunacy - Jan Svankmajer (2005)

Lunacy (aka Sílení)
From Jan Svankmajer

Quote :

A horror movie testing two approaches to running an insane asylum - absolute freedom versus control and punishment - within the context of a world that combines the worst of both. Jean Berlot, a young man subject to a nightmare of being forced into a straitjacket by two orderlies, is befriended by a marquis. At the marquis's estate, Jean witnesses a black Mass, buries someone alive, and is invited to try preventive therapy. He's willing to enter a sanatorium because he believes he can rescue a young woman from there who has told him that the real director and staff of the clinic are locked in the basement. Jean conspires with her to set them free: the horrors have only begun

I wouldn't really classify this movie as horror, there are no blood in this movie, nothing scary and nothing which we would traditionally call horror, I would consider it more a satirical comedie or an unclassable. But I dont want to contradict Monsieur Jan Svankmajer who says it himself: it is an horror movie
Actually let me first give you the introduction he gives at the beginning of the movie which I think summarize it perfectly:

"Ladies and Gentlemen, what you are about to see is a horror film—with all the degeneracy peculiar to that genre. It is not a work of art. Today, art is all but dead anyway. In its place is a kind of trailer for the reflection of the face of Narcissus. Our film may be regarded as an infantile tribute to Edgar Allen Poe, from whom I've borrowed a number of motifs. And to the Marquis de Sade, to whom the film owes its blasphemy and subversiveness.
The subject of the film is essentially an ideological debate about how to run a lunatic asylum. Basically, there are two ways of managing such an institution—each equally extreme. One encourages absolute freedom. The other, the old-fashioned, well tried method of control and punishment. But there is also a third one, that combines and exacerbates the very worst aspects of the other two. And that is the madhouse we live in today"

Pretty deep hey
Well it is simply the most amazing work I have seen from this director so far, even better than Conspirators of Pleasure which I really adore for his magnificient satirical vision of people fetishissm and obsessions. Now he goes one step further: this movie is a satire of insanity and the approach of our society towards it, people pervations as well as the limits of freedom. All this mixed into a totally crazy and hilarious farce sometimes stopped by some animated parts showing us some pieces of meat chasing each other (ha ha ha Food is always there in his movies and always will be )
It is very funny and in the same time makes you think, really one of the kind