After losing her boyfriend in a mysterious mass extinction event, in which all the men in the world die by suicide, Joyce seeks solace at Nostalgyl, a company helping women reconnect with their past experiences. But when her emotional dependence turns into addiction, Joyce is swept into the dark recesses of a post-masculine world. With its intense colour palette, inventive prosthetics and intricate editing, Gonzalo Fernandez’s dystopian psychodrama Venus plunges the viewer into a lurid universe of an oppressive atmosphere. Lingering close to Joyce’s perspective, the film shuttles rapidly between reality and fantasy, experience and memory, such that we come to share the protagonist’s anxiety and confusion. Drawing elements from sci-fi and body horror, Venus opens the door to a nightmarish fantasy of a mythical nature.
