The inner workings of the human body are laid bare in this extraordinary, immersive documentary by Lucien Castaing Taylor and Véréna Paravel, the Harvard Sensory Ethnographic Lab duo behind Leviathan (2012). Granted intimate access to the operating tables of several French hospitals, the directors’s probing cameras reveal hidden, hyperreal, almost alien landscapes of flesh and viscera where eyes, brains, intestines, spinal columns, and prostate glands are operated upon in astonishing detail, whilst in the background exhausted surgeons bicker about overtime. A disorienting, shocking, at times perversely beautiful, and ultimately unforgettable tour into the very essence of our corporeality.

Notes by David O’Mahony