It's safe to say there's nothing quite like Taxidermia under the sun. Hungarian director Gyorgy Palfi's new film is a goulash of bodily fluids and perversity, a nearly unclassifiable visceral feast for the senses. This vulgar follow-up to Palfi's surreal delight Hukkle traces three generations of men who ejaculate fire, eat until they are morbidly obese and push the limits of ethical embalming. The film's unrestrained, anarchic visual imagination and grotesque poetry leave one in disbelief. Vendel (Csaba Czene) is a depraved, sex-starved orderly stationed during wartime at a remote outpost, with only his lieutenant's large wife and daughters to distract him. After engaging in all manner of indelicacies (including drinking the girls' dirty bathwater), he is mortally punished for his sins. However, the lieutenant's wife is pregnant with Vendel's son, Kalman (Gergely Trocsanyi), who grows up to become a gluttonous champion speed-eater during the Communist era. He marries a corpulent fellow competitor who bears him a miniature child, Lajos (Marc Bischoff). In the final section, Lajos is a scrawny, rakish taxidermist who takes care of his morbidly obese – and thankfully retired – father and his army of giant, very hungry cats. Lajos initiates an intricate, beautifully twisted ritual whereby he meticulously transforms himself into a sublime human art object.

Taxidermia is structured as an evolution from wild, unrestrained libido to regimented binging and purging to total, ascetic self-mastery – arguably an apt allegory of the course of twentieth-century politics. The first two tales are based on the work of Hungarian writer Lajos Nagy Parti, while Palfi and his wife Zsofia Ruttkay invented the final chapter. The film's sharp, bawdy humour and its visual excess – with bodies stretched to their limits through jaw-droppingly tactile special effects – are so audacious as to set a new benchmark for what weird and wonderful things the human body is capable of in the cinematic medium. Let the bacchanalia begin!

Dimitri Eipides