Man Eating Pussy (2026)
Well, this is one I will not forget in a hurry. Emily Lawson's Man Eating Pussy is as confrontational as its title promises, a grotesque, strange and surprisingly tender little piece of body horror that uses one genuinely unforgettable image to say something real. It does not all land in its brief running time, but what does land stays with you. Three and a half stars.
The premise is exactly as wild as you have heard. Kitty, played by Grace Glowicki, is a sex worker with a vagina where her face should be, and men at the very end of their lives come to her to be enveloped by her, one final act of surrender before meeting their maker. Freddie, played by the wonderful Julian Richings, is one such man, and what begins as a surreal, transactional encounter slowly turns into something quieter and more human, a strange sort of tenderness passing between them in a dimly lit hotel room.
The design is the film's headline achievement, and rightly so. Kitty is a genuinely astonishing creation, grotesque and detailed and unsettlingly precise, and the make-up and prosthetics work is frankly brilliant, especially for what I imagine was a fairly modest budget. It is the kind of practical effect that announces a real craft team, and it anchors the whole surreal conceit in something tactile and horribly convincing.
And it is saying something. Beneath the shock, this is a pointed, thoughtful film about the way men objectify and consume women, about the collapse of sex, birth and death into a single image, with a strong streak of the Oedipal running through it and, I think, a reach towards something like female power and reclamation. Lawson, who has spoken about her own experiences acting in horror where women's bodies are framed as sites of violence, is clearly turning that image back on itself, and the message is effective precisely because it is wrapped in something so visceral.
If I have a real reservation, it is simply that twelve minutes is not enough. The idea is so rich, and the character of Kitty so striking, that I came away wishing the film had the room to properly explore its people and its themes rather than gesturing at them. The acting is solid and the story is simple, perhaps too simple, and this is one of those rare shorts that feels less like a complete miniature than a brilliant proof of concept. I would genuinely love to see Lawson develop this into a feature, because there is a whole world here that twelve minutes can only hint at.
Three and a half stars. Man Eating Pussy is a bold, grotesque and genuinely intelligent piece of body horror, carried by extraordinary effects work and a real idea at its centre, held back only by a runtime too short for its own ambitions. Not for the faint of heart, obviously, but if you have the stomach for it, it is one of the most distinctive shorts you will see this year, and it marks Lawson as a film-maker to watch.
Man Eating Pussy screens at the BFI London Film Festival as part of the Land of Hope and Gory shorts programme and at the Sitges Film Festival.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country Canada: The Butterfly Effect (2004), A Special Day (1977), Land of the Dead (2005)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More horror: The Influencer Project (2026), Child (2026), Leave Me Alone (2025)
