‘Objet a’ Review: Ann Oren’s Wickedly Kinky Curiosity Eroticizes Everything From Mushrooms to Mushroom Cuts

Variety | 14.08.2026 20:50
Objet a” was Lacan’s term for the lack, the absence, that sets our desires into motion; an object-cause rather than a physical object. If it were the latter, a more apt title for Ann Oren‘s delicious new film would be “Object A to Z,” given the impressively vast range of things — everyday and obscure, tangible and intangible, sublime and ridiculous — that become fetish fodder in the course of its heavily stimulated 95 minutes. Following a couple of brilliant young surgeons who exert absolute control in the operating theater but surrender to wilder impulses in the bedroom, Oren’s equally off-kilter follow-up to 2022’s animal-instinct erotic fantasia “Piaffe” will hold onto that film’s select but ardent cult, and seduce further converts in global arthouses.