“Objet a” was Lacan’s term for the lack, the absence, that sets our desires into motion; an object-cause rather than a physical object. If it were the latter, a more apt title for Ann Oren‘s delicious new film would be “Object A to Z,” given the impressively vast range of things — everyday and obscure, tangible and intangible, sublime and ridiculous — that become fetish fodder in the course of its heavily stimulated 95 minutes. Following a couple of brilliant young surgeons who exert absolute control in the operating theater but surrender to wilder impulses in the bedroom, Oren’s equally off-kilter follow-up to 2022’s animal-instinct erotic fantasia “Piaffe” will hold onto that film’s select but ardent cult, and seduce further converts in global arthouses.
Oscilloscope Laboratories has already bought U.S. rights to this eye-catching oddity, which premiered — as did “Piaffe” — in Locarno’s main competition, and seals Oren as the kind of ready-minted auteur, fully distinctive in her style and obsessions, who’s sure to become a fixture on the A-list festival circuit. Formally and conceptually, “Objet a” reps a sleek step up in both ambition and execution for the helmer, abetted by performances of considerable daring, wit and physical abandon by German stars Aenne Schwarz (“All Is Well”) and Louis Hofmann (Netflix’s “All the Light We Cannot See”), the latter rocking about the most fungiform men’s bowl cut seen on screen since Anton Chigurh.
