Fantasia Fest: Insectasy (2026): The Itch Nobody Talks About

Film Title: Insectasy
Director: Angus Silver
Writer: Angus Silver
Cast: Tirion Healy (Sadie), Lyndall Huber (Honey), Emmett Roiko (Theo)
Production: Foggy Ocean Pictures
Country: Canada
Language: English
Filming Location: Vancouver Island, British Columbia
Release Date: July 24, 2026 (Canada)
Festival Fantasia Film Festival 2026
Watched on: Festival Screening
Review by: Mother of Movies (Australian Press)

Insectasy Review (2026): When Desire Crawls

Angus Silver’s Insectasy is a portrait of compulsive desire dressed up in genre strangeness, and the strangest part is how precisely it executes that. Sadie (Tirion Healy) doesn’t seek connection. She seeks escalation. What begins with crickets becomes cockroaches becomes a rare moth, each step a tolerance-building exercise in a woman who has found the only intimacy she trusts will never betray her: the non-human kind.

The film doesn’t announce this. You feel it. You watch the progression and realize you’re not watching shock value, you’re watching the innermost workings of addiction with all its clinical detail intact. The intensification isn’t gratuitous because it’s necessary to the film’s actual argument. Desire, when it lives outside the norm, doesn’t plateau. It hunts for the next threshold.

What makes Insectasy work is is that it doesn’t judge Sadie or perform moral distance. Silver shoots her world with an ornate, almost reverential precision. The filtered light, the chrysalis imagery, the way insects are framed as objects of genuine fascination rather than punchlines, The visual language matches the interior state. The dream-fevery aesthetic isn’t there to make overstepping prettier. It’s there because this is how Sadie’s mind works. The film is her fever dream, not ours.

Tirion Healy carries Insectasy with no performance performance of sexuality, just a woman moving through her solitary rituals with the focused intensity of someone who has stopped pretending she wants anything else. She doesn’t latch onto people. She doesn’t perform normalcy. She simply exists in her thing, and the camera respects that life without commentary.

The supporting cast (Lyndall Huber as Honey, Emmett Roiko as Theo) functions as the outside world, well-meaning, baffled, ultimately irrelevant. They represent the vanilla. They represent the expectation that Sadie should want what they want. The film’s coldness toward them isn’t cruelty; it’s accuracy. To Sadie, their concerns are background noise. She’s listening to something else entirely.

Ornate Transgression

What’s genuinely difficult about Insectasy is that it refuses the easy out. It doesn’t resolve into tragedy or redemption. It doesn’t suggest that Sadie’s desires are a symptom of something that needs fixing. Instead, it suggests something more unsettling: that some people are simply wired differently, that their solitude is not a wound but a choice, and that the world’s discomfort with that choice says more about the world than about them. The film ends not with a moral but with a continuation, Sadie will keep doing what she does because she has no reason to stop.

There’s a generosity in this that most provocative cinema lacks. Insectasy doesn’t require you to participate in Sadie’s desires to understand her. It requires you to recognize that the impulse driving her, the need for something that feels real, that exists outside the social contract, is fundamentally human, even when its expression is radically not.

The production is meticulous. Every frame is composed with intention. The sound design (insects as both texture and rhythm) creates an immersive world that’s genuinely uncomfortable to inhabit. You will grimace (I did). You will squirm (I also did that too). You will also find yourself unable to look away, not because you’re being manipulated into shock, but because Silver has made something so visually and thematically coherent that it simply dominates.

Insectasy is not a film for broad audiences. It’s a film for people who live outside the norm, who have their own communities, who are always looking to push their own limits. It’s a film that knows exactly who it’s for and doesn’t pretend otherwise.

In a genre that often mistakes extreme imagery for depth, Silver has made something with actual depth underneath the strangeness.

Verdict and Rating

Insectasy is rated

4 out of 5 ornate, unsettling, and precisely intentional

About Angus Silver – Filmmaker Stamp

Angus Silver is a Canadian filmmaker whose work consistently explores desire, isolation, and the spaces where human impulse meets social violation. Insectasy continues his pattern of building immersive, visually meticulous worlds that refuse easy moral frameworks. Silver doesn’t make films about people who need fixing. He makes films about people who are exactly what they are, and the discomfort that creates in viewers who expect narrative redemption.

Similar Titles to Insectasy – Although They Probably Won’t Feature Bugs

• Titane (2016) — Utra violent body horror with genuine emotional depth beneath the strangeness.
• Bight (2026) — A story about articstic creativity and sexual freedom all rolled into a horror movie.
• Raw (2016) — A coming-of-age film that uses taboo desire as a lens for isolation and self-discovery.
• Saint Maud (2019) — Psychological unraveling told through visual precision and obsessive framing.
• PVT Chat (2020) — Director Ben Howzie made a films about online sex workers and it’s worthy of your time.
• The Substance (2024) — Body-focused counterculture film that refuses to apologize for its own strangeness.
• Blowie (2026) — Explotative film with loads of non vanilla sexual scenes evolving around a slasher film made by porno stars.
• Morgana (2019) — Does getting older mean you can never take risks? One of my all time favorite documentaries about sex and aging in a world where these two things don’t go together.

Where to Watch Insectasy – Streaming Options