This 1969 atmospheric and uncanny masterpiece marks the formal beginning of David Cronenberg’s career as a director of feature film. Stereo, as the name connotes, is a series of audio tapes, which are assumedly recorded by doctors from the Institute of Erotic Inquiry (where the film takes place). The tapes detail, in a way not always obviously chronologically, the experiments undergone on this strange telepathic polyamorous cohort.
Stereo is visually infatuating in its mise en scene and cinematography, and entices further inquiry at every corner. This is made possible by a highly ambiguous plot which requires a large amount of self-processing and supposition to endure, but combined with the strange events that place before our eyes and the highly sophisticated and experimental approach to atmospheric audio, Stereo is an enigma that I found almost impossible to resist, but impossible again to know if I had cracked.
Stereo is a bombardment of the senses that briefly touches on themes that would come to define the main bulk of Cronenberg’s oeuvre in later years, such as psychics/telepathists, a psychoanalytic approach to sexuality, body horror and scientific/technological experimentation. Highly conceptual cinema in the most fascinating kind of way and unlike anything I’ve seen before, must experience.
