Heavy Metal Detox (Josef Dabernig, 2019) (Patreon)

In recent years, there has been considerable interest in the intersection of experimental cinema and horror. A lot of this was occasioned by work coming out of Austria, birthplace of Freud and the uncanny, and perhaps not coincidentally the locus of some pretty bracing stuff in the avant-garde art world. There's the Viennese Aktionists, of course, with their ritual bloodletting and headlong dive into primitive regression. And, as if to make that irrationalist work even more frightening, you often had highly rigorous filmmakers such as Peter Kubelka, Kurt Kren, and Valie Export, providing a hyper-mathematical shape to animal slaughter and bodily functions. Probably the most famous avant-horror film is Peter Tscherkassky's Outer Space, a found footage nightmare using scenes from The Entity. In Tscherkassky's film, Barbary Hershey is menaced not just by a sexually aggressive ghost, as in the original film, but by the breakdown of the celluloid itself.

This is perhaps the best context in which to understand Josef Dabernig's latest film Heavy Metal Detox. In certain respects, it is a brief documentary about Dabernig's trip to the dentist. But in its fragmentation, pacing, and editing, and its skillful orchestration of the seen and the unseen, Heavy Metal Detox is an experience to quite literally set your own teeth on edge. As profound an example of body-horror as anything Cronenberg could cook up, but more disturbing because of its palpable excavation into real-world flesh and bone, Heavy Metal Detox explores not just the discomfort of an elaborate procedure (the removal of metal fillings and their replacement with durable plastics), but the viewer's fear of being in the chair. The film ramps up anxiety rather than soothing it.

We know intellectually that Dabernig is receiving good care. But Heavy Metal Detox emphasizes his helplessness at the hands of unseen technicians who invade the body with tools and devices. The soundtrack alternates between ominous tones and the harsh sound of the drill. And the contrast the film sets up between the cold, white, antiseptic spaces of the dentists' office and its equipment, on the one hand, and the moist, dark expanse of Dabernig's mouth, on the other, is deeply unnerving. In a way, it reminds us of a paradox at the heart of this medical phobia. Like those earlier Austrian experimentalists, Dabernig is setting up a dialectic between the dirty and the clean, and our bodies are the dirty. The "horror" lives inside of us.