If you’ve ever wanted to experience what it’s like to have your frontal lobe slowly scraped away with an ice cream scoop while a disembodied Canadian voice narrates psychobabble about telepathy and sexual repression over static images of people walking around a brutalist architecture campus in dead silence—then congratulations. You’ve found your film. David Cronenberg’s Stereo is 63 minutes of monochrome Canadian film school fever dream masquerading as a movie. It’s the cinematic equivalent of being trapped inside the mind of a philosophy undergrad who just discovered LSD and Foucault in the same week.
This was Cronenberg’s directorial debut, and boy, does it feel like it. Shot in grainy black-and-white on a budget that could barely cover the cost of a moose tranquilizer, Stereo plays out like the lovechild of a Canadian tax shelter and a medical textbook. There is no dialogue. None. Not one line of spoken conversation. Instead, a monotone narrator drones on like HAL 9000 reading excerpts from a psych thesis paper found under a wet ashtray. The narration is so dense with jargon and pseudo-scientific bafflegab that I half-expected the screen to flash, “If you understand this, seek help.”
The “plot,” such as it is, revolves around the Canadian Academy of Erotic Inquiry—stop laughing, that’s a real thing in the film—where psychic experiments are conducted on volunteers who have undergone surgery to supposedly unlock telepathic abilities. These poor souls (and the audience) are subjected to a series of bizarre, soundless sequences in which they stumble around a concrete campus like lobotomized mimes. Occasionally, someone lights a cigarette or fondles a wall. One of the “subjects” wears sunglasses indoors, presumably to shield his eyes from the blinding brightness of not acting.
Imagine if Stanley Kubrick got blackout drunk, lost a bet, and decided to direct an episode of Nova using mannequins and interpretive dance. That’s Stereo. The film takes place entirely in the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus, a masterpiece of lifeless modernist architecture that somehow manages to look like a post-apocalyptic DMV. Cronenberg clearly fell in love with these cement corridors, because he films every goddamn inch of them—slow pans, long shots, wide angles, low angles, high angles—like he’s trying to seduce the building.
Visually, the movie flirts with competence. There are moments—brief flashes—where Cronenberg’s eye for framing and his obsession with the body and alienation peek through the cement cracks. But for every decent shot, there are four more that feel like accidental test footage or someone just forgot to hit “stop recording.” There’s a distinct art school vibe to the entire thing, but not in the good way. More in the “we found an old projector and a half ounce of hash” kind of way.
The experimental nature of Stereo is its only defense, and even that’s flimsy. Sure, it’s supposed to be abstract. It’s supposed to challenge you. But when challenging turns into punishing, we have a problem. If you squint hard enough, you can pretend this is an avant-garde meditation on the limitations of language and the collapse of identity in the face of unspoken psychic communion. But honestly, it plays more like a white noise machine with delusions of grandeur.
The narration—Jesus, the narration. Delivered with all the passion of a funeral home voicemail, the voiceover references “telepathic bonding,” “homosexual dependency syndromes,” and “reprogramming libidinal responses” with the enthusiasm of someone describing sandpaper. It’s like listening to Sigmund Freud and Spock perform a TED Talk on a dial-up modem. And because there’s no actual dialogue between the characters, these bizarre scientific proclamations are never grounded in human behavior. We’re left watching silent figures stand awkwardly in rooms while the narrator insists something mind-blowing is happening. It’s not.
And then there’s the sexuality. Or maybe the idea of sexuality. Cronenberg seems deeply fascinated by eroticism, but in Stereo, it’s about as sexy as a colonoscopy. There are homoerotic overtones—men gazing at each other, touching each other’s shoulders—but it’s all presented with the clinical detachment of a frog dissection. Sexuality here is studied like mold growing in a petri dish. It’s not passionate, it’s pathological. Cronenberg was clearly revving the engine for the body horror and psychosexual dread he’d eventually perfect, but Stereo feels like he’s still trying to find the instruction manual for the car.
The actors—or rather, the human furniture on screen—do nothing to help. There is no performance to speak of. They’re essentially moving props, shuffled from room to room like mannequins in a cold war experiment. You could replace them with department store dummies and nobody would notice, except the dummies might be more expressive. It’s one of the few films where the extras could unionize under the title “human placeholder.”
Now, let’s be fair. Every great filmmaker starts somewhere, and Stereo is Cronenberg’s first cinematic kidney stone. You can spot the germs of his future obsessions: the exploration of the mind-body split, the anxiety over technology invading human biology, the obsession with detached clinical environments. But these are germs—microscopic, dormant, buried under pretension and the desire to be taken seriously by a grad school thesis committee.
The best way to watch Stereo is under the influence of something—booze, cough syrup, or a strong desire to hate yourself. Watching it sober is like volunteering for a sleep study that never ends. You sit there, wide-eyed, questioning your life choices as the narrator mumbles about sexual surrogates while some guy stares at a window for five minutes.
But to its credit, Stereo is honest. It doesn’t try to entertain. It doesn’t pretend to be a movie in the traditional sense. It’s a statement. A deeply weird, borderline unwatchable statement, but a statement nonetheless. Cronenberg kicked in the cinematic door with a monotone whisper instead of a bang, but in retrospect, Stereo is his twisted seedling—ugly, awkward, barely alive, but fated to grow into something monstrous and brilliant.
Final thoughts: Stereo is 63 minutes that feel like a week. It’s the kind of film you watch to say you’ve watched it, then lie about liking it at film school parties. If you make it through without checking your watch or your pulse, you deserve a medal—or at least a refund.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 lobotomized telepaths.
Watch it if you hate yourself, or you’re writing a dissertation on how not to make a debut feature.
