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Stereo is a bizarre, underground film, shot in a timeless black and white. It is a profound film, relevant in its experimentation, even though it is over forty years old.
Stereo is the (apparently) detached, scientific account of an aberration, more than an actual experiment. The characters (few) are surgically stripped of their voices (a radical communicative amputation) and made telepathic, capable of expanding their minds beyond any boundary and sharing their thoughts with others. The project of a perfect society miserably collapses, giving way to perversion, nervousness, and emotional alienation.
What strikes in Stereo is (paradoxically) the role of the voice, eliminated from bodies by scalpel strokes yet so present, remaining however distant, unequivocally off and off-screen. It is a voice, that of Stereo, that narrates the manipulation of the mind and body by science that seems to demand everything, even the control of feelings, words, and opinions.
David Cronenberg, in his debut, directs an atypical and decidedly weird work, literally giving body (and image) to alienated individuals, who move like fish in an aquarium, among cold, uninhabited, ghostly buildings. The failure of science leaves a hope for residual humanity, but there is the terror that everything has already happened, that communication and life have been compromised in the cyber world we live in.
All that is left is to wait. For what, however, we are not given to know...
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