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Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Great Film overall

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Sandra Larson was always fascinated with dead things. She would rub small dead animals on herself. She shocks her one and only friend Carol when she does it in front of her. Carol stops seeing her leaving her even more of an outcast. As a young woman, she (Molly Parker) apprentices for funeral home owner Mr. Wallis. Fellow student Matt (Peter Outerbridge) falls for her and they get into a relationship. However, her love of the dead becomes necrophilia and he struggles to understand her obsession.It's a beautiful, almost spiritual romantic take on ... necrophilia. I don't know what to do with this. It's definitely not grotesque which makes me question it even more afterward. Obviously, no actual dead bodies are used. So the gross factor isn't in the experience of watching the movie. It's in the dissecting of the movie after watching it. The younger Sandra is pretty interesting with her only friend. The older Sandra's romance with Matt is perplexing. The necrophilia is done with sexuality like a normal sex scene which ends in a bright light as she perceives the soul of the dead. Molly Parker is beautiful and compelling. Other than the controversy, she's all there is in the movie.

To understand a person's fetish, my guess is that you would have to share that fetish. Maybe that's why it's hard to get close to Sandra Larson, the necrophiliac at the center of 'Kissed', a bold film by Canadian director Lynn Stopkewich. This was the film that caused a huge stink at the Toronto Film Festival only because it is about a necrophiliac.But Stopkewich walks a very fine line to avoid making the film exploitive or ridiculous. She could have made the worst film of the year but her frankness and restraint keep the viewer fascinated but not repelled.The center of the film is Sandra who from childhood has had a fascination with death. She describes one summer with her friend when they would find dead animals and have funerals for them. At nightfall she would perform the strange ritual of shrouding the body and then rubbing it on her skin which she calls 'anointing'.As a young woman (played by Molly Parker) working in a flower shop she is overjoyed when she is allowed to make a delivery to the local funeral home and soon she is working there. When she touches the bodies we don't sense a sick fascination but a passage, a transcendence which she calls 'crossing over'. When she touches the bodies there is a heavenly light, accompanied by an angelic chorus. This could have been done in very poor taste but we understand from the intensity in Parker's performance that there is something very serious going on, something about setting them free, 'Each of them has its own wisdom, innocence, happiness, grief. I see it' While in college she meets a man who, oddly enough, is fascinated by what she is doing. 'Why would you want to be an embalmer?' he asks her on their first meeting. 'Because of the bodies, I make love to them' she says without missing a beat. He is interested in her attraction but doesn't understand the emotional bond. He grows jealous of her attraction to the dead and is willing to do anything to gain her affections.The scenes in which she performs her rituals are done with extreme restraint. Stopkewich uses her camera to suggest what Sandra is doing but then pulls back so that he have only the idea. The movie is never interested in the mechanics of Sandra's sexuality but more in its spiritual nature.

As some other reviewers have already pointed out, "Kissed" is not a bad film because it tries to tackle the taboo subject of necrophilia -- it's a bad film because it does a bad job of dealing with the subject matter. It's as if the writer and director wanted to make a "Lifetime" movie about necrophilia. (See how yucky that is? Well...that's pretty much the feeling throughout the movie as well.) As I stated in one of the board threads, what I found most disturbing about this film was not the subject matter of necrophilia, although that clearly IS something very disturbing in itself. What I found most disturbing is the fact that the film maker has attempted to somehow glorify that sick, twisted fetish and equate it with love. It is NOT LOVE. It is mental illness of the highest order. And to even begin to glamorize, beautify, or glorify it, as this film does, is even more offensive than the subject matter itself.IF the film had at least attempted to try to UNDERSTAND necrophilia -- which in and of itself would have been one hell of an undertaking -- that would be different. But it doesn't come close to doing that. What it does is titillate and obfuscate the issue(s), then paint some twisted variation of a Disney "ain't love grand" nonsensical ending over top of it.Kissed might arguably be a worthwhile film to watch if for nothing else than to see what necrophilia is NOT, and to stimulate some sort of thought process into what it might be. Aside from that, the film has little if any redeeming value.

'Kissed' is a surprisingly serious and low-key depiction of some potentially sensationalist subject matter. The film is artily constructed, and nicely acted, but lacks a sense of immediacy, perhaps because the "crime" it portrays is both victimless (at first) and weird: you can almost believe in this strange obsession, but you can't really relate to it. There are some good points: there's some insight and humour when the necrophiliac heroine's boyfriend becomes jealous of her corpses, some splendidly seedy portrayals of her co-workers at a funeral home, and the choice of child and adult actors for the same character is unusually perfect; but overall, 'Kissed' is simply a bit dull. You might be better off flogging a dead horse...