Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection (2023)

Surgery is the new sex, 18th-century style. In David Cronenberg’s wry, surrealist miniature, four anatomical female wax models—taken from the collection of Florence’s 250-year-old science museum La Specola—lie in uncanny repose as the camera dreamily caresses their detachable organs, exposed body cavities, and glossy ceroplastic flesh. Under the director’s inimitable gaze, objects created as pedagogical tools take on an impassioned agency, contorting in perpetual agony and ecstasy.