Electric Meat (2026)
I wanted to be won over by Electric Meat. Everything about it is designed to appeal to the part of me that loves cinema at its strangest: a wordless, black and white psychosexual thriller from the comic book artist Dan Schaffer, making his feature directing debut, premiering in the dead of night at FrightFest. That is a pitch built for a certain kind of viewer, and I am usually that viewer. So it gives me no pleasure to report that I came away admiring the ambition far more than the film.
The premise is pure fever dream. A photographer discovers the body of a murdered woman, takes her home, and slowly falls into an obsession with the corpse he has claimed as his new muse. In time she seems to stir back into something like life, though the film is careful never to tell us whether she is truly waking or whether we are simply trapped inside his unravelling mind. It is Pygmalion by way of the mortuary, a lineage that runs from Vertigo through the grubbier corners of European horror, and Schaffer clearly knows exactly which tradition he is working in.
When Electric Meat is good, it is good to look at. Shot in a grainy, high contrast monochrome, it conjures a genuine atmosphere of decay and desire on what was plainly a tiny budget, and there are individual images here that would not shame a far more expensive picture. Schaffer has the eye you would expect from a man who has spent his career composing panels, and every so often a frame lands with real force. The soundtrack does an enormous amount of the heavy lifting too. With no dialogue to carry us, the score by Jacob Ryman and the voice of singer Katiejane Garside become the film's nervous system, and it is easily the most consistently accomplished thing about the whole enterprise.
It is also, in long stretches, essentially softcore erotica. There is a great deal of nudity and a lot of slow, suggestive movement, and while some of that clearly belongs to the delirium the film is chasing, it starts to feel repetitive well before the end. After a while the provocation stops provoking and simply becomes the wallpaper, another loop in a film that already struggles to move forward.
And that is the real trouble. Electric Meat has no dialogue at all, not a word spoken and not a word written, and while that is a bold choice on paper, in practice it leaves the picture with almost nowhere to go. There is only so far a single haunted image can carry you, and without language, or much in the way of plot, the minutes begin to sag. I have rarely watched a film that felt so much longer than it actually is. Time stops meaning anything, and not in the hypnotic way the film is reaching for, but in the way of a night that will not end.
You can feel the shape of what this should have been. Schaffer comes out of short films, and Electric Meat is, at heart, a short film's idea stretched to feature length. As a taut twenty minute piece this could have been a small knockout, all mood and menace, gone before it wore out its welcome. Blown up to feature size, the returns diminish fast, and the very things that make an arresting short, the repetition, the abstraction, the refusal to explain, curdle into tedium across an hour and a half. The themes are there and the imagery is there. The story to sustain them is not.
Two and a half stars. There is a real film-maker somewhere in here, and I would happily watch whatever Dan Schaffer does next, particularly if he lets someone speak. But good intentions and a strong eye are not enough to fill a feature on their own, and for all its atmosphere Electric Meat is finally a mood in search of a movie. I admired the reach. I just spent most of it waiting for it to end.
Reviewed from a screener provided ahead of the film's world premiere at FrightFest, where Electric Meat premieres on 28 August 2026.
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