Stereo (1969)

• Year: 1969
• Released: 30 Nov 1973
• Country: Canada
• Adwords: N/A
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065036/
• Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/stereo
• Metacritics:
• Available in: 720p, 1080p,
• Language: English
• MPA Rating: Not Rated
• Genre: Sci-Fi
• Runtime: 65 min
• Writer: David Cronenberg
• Director: David Cronenberg
• Cast: Ronald Mlodzik, Jack Messinger, Paul Mulholland
• Keywords: experiment, telepathy, omnisexuality,

	5.1/10
	42/100
	67% – Critics
	29% – Audience

Stereo Storyline

Sometime in the future, the Canadian Academy for Erotic Inquiry is investigating the theories of parapsychologist Luther Stringfellow. Seven young adults volunteer to submit to a form of brain surgery that removes their power of speech but increases their power for telepathic communication. An unseen group of students observes the results. As the experiment progresses, Stringfellow’s theories come to fruition. Later, aphrodisiacs and various other drugs are introduced to the subjects to expose an inherent polymorphous perversity. (SPOILER ALERT!) In the end, they are isolated from each other, provoking antagonism and violence between them, which results in two suicides.—Daeha Ko

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Stereo Movie Reviews

A Great Study of Cinema

Sometime in the future, the Canadian Academy for Erotic Inquiry is investigating the theories of parapsychologist Luther Stringfellow. Seven young adults volunteer to submit to a form of brain surgery that removes their power of speech but increases their power for telepathic communication.

If you are looking for a film to show at a party, this is not that film. It is black and white, slow-paced and almost entirely silent. Your party people will fall asleep and call you a loser.

If you are someone who loves David Cronenberg or enjoys the study of film and camera techniques, I think you might find an interesting film here. While set up as a faux documentary about the study of “telepathists” at the “Center for Erotic Inquiry”, there is very little plot and mostly just interesting scenes and visuals.

Watch the lighting, angles. Pretend you are a guest in the room, a voyeur but not a participant. Notice the dark and creepy feel, despite the fact the story itself is not creepy and no music is added. The angles and lighting alone can give the feeling of darkness and depression.

A beautiful film, and one that really laid the foundation for the next thirty years of Cronenberg greatness. His themes of medical oddities, unusual science and body horror are evident here. The exploration (voluntary or otherwise) of new states of consciousness via sexual experimentation is a major theme in “Shivers”, “Videodrome”, “Dead Ringers”, “Naked Lunch”, “M. Butterfly” and “Crash”. To understand Cronenberg, one must understand this film.

Early Cronenberg film makes for an interesting, but overall frustrating watch

Done in a very cold and clinical style, with no direct sound, droning narration that’s overloaded with pretentious pseudo-scientific jargon, and great use of a fantastic sprawling location, David Cronenberg’s 65-minute debut feature about an experiment on increasing telepathic psychic abilities amongst several volunteer test subjects with unexpected dangerous side effects makes for decidedly rough going, but still manages to impress due to its striking black and white cinematography and a wealth of fascinating ideas that could have benefited from a stronger presentation. The lack of sound proves to be a huge problem, as whole sequences that transpire in total silence are alas positively agonizing to sit through because they seem to go on for an excruciating eternity. Moreover, the glacial pacing certainly doesn’t help matters at all while the lack of characterization ensures that the volunteers for the experiment come across more like distant objects than sympathetic human beings. Fortunately, the cast still manage to contribute remarkably expressive pantomime performances as Cronenberg explores his trademark themes of identity, sexuality, and science gone amok. So, it’s definitely not top Cronenberg, but nonetheless serves as an intriguing precursor to such latter works as “Shivers” and especially “Scanners.”

location, location, location

Cronenberg’s first feature is a bizarre, distended thing, whose real star is the location. I’m guessing we’re looking at York University campus; regardless, every obscure tableau he stages is self-consciously dwarfed by the forbidding institutional architecture that houses it. The sporadic voice-over that occasionally rises from the silence suggests that we’re watching a narrative about a sexual telepathy clinic whose mandate goes seriously awry. If you concentrate, you can see how this relates to the on screen shenanigans in a linear and probably even preplanned way – it’s not just precious mannerisms, although it is that as well. The film makes the most of its visual material with a special thing for fisheye pans, and it runs free love through a dystopian sci-fi wringer in a way that will be familiar to fans of his later work, even including a giveaway throw to “Scanners”. But after a while it does get tedious, and while Cronenberg’s iconoclasm remains enjoyable and felt, minimalist sci-fi on no budget was always easier to pull off in print than on screen.