Legs
2022 · 15m · UK
Directed by Celine Cotran
Genres: dark comedy, drama, horror
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, tense
Joy and Harry are trying to have a baby, but when Joy accidentally swallows a spider in her sleep and develops an insatiable appetite for flies, she begins to wonder if motherhood might come in a stranger form than expected.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Taking a nursery rhyme about consumption and turning it into a body-horror riff on reproductive anxiety is exactly the kind of premise that makes people uncomfortable—which is precisely why it works. Cotran refuses the easy metaphor and lets the absurdity breathe, which is contrarian filmmaking at its best.
The film's structural debt to the nursery rhyme gives it a formal scaffold that elevates what could have been merely grotesque into something with real architectural intention; the escalating logic of the conceit mirrors the mounting pressures of fertility culture itself.
The decision to play Joy's transformation with a kind of deadpan earnestness—treating the fly-eating as mundane domestic fact rather than spectacle—is what sells the horror and keeps the whole thing from tipping into parody.
Reviews
A clever conceit that balances humor with the reality of feeling left behind by peers and unloved in a relationship.
Starting with sinister promise but failing to find a satisfactory destination.
Festivals
- FrightFest 2022
- Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival (BIFFF) 2022