Review: ‘Corpus’ is sublimely sexy fun that leaves you wanting more

Corpus has one of the most unsettling openings of any movie I’ve seen recently. Wren, an inexperienced model in 1997 New York City played by Nuha Jes Izman (Yellowjackets), is shooting for noted fashion photographer Billie (co-writer Lily Cowles), heard but not seen directly, who tells her what a natural she is and, if played by a man, would come across as a stereotypically creepy photographer. Then Billie brings in a naked man wearing this phallic tribal mask. It’s unclear what happens, and suddenly we jump ahead a year to a new set of characters, but the scene is so unsettling that we’re instantly destabilized and unsure of anything that comes next. 

Our real protagonist, Sayo (Mark Walhberg’s nephew, Jeff), is a talented photographer, but slumming it in a trendy underground warehouse as a coke dealer. His former muse/best friend/occasional lover Vince (Brodie Townshend, who looks strikingly like Ezra Miller) has left him behind for Hollywood, until he reappears, trying to seduce Sayo into accompanying him and their other childhood friend, the stereotypical horn dog, Ross (Michael Vlamis, Pools), to an industry party of the photographer who just shot a big cover spread for him. You can already guess it’s Billie’s house, the photographer from the first scene. 

When the trio arrives at this decadent upstate New York estate, it’s not a party, and there are only three women there: Billie, her much older lover, Cata (Ching Valdes-Aran, Across the Universe), and most surprisingly, Wren, who we return to butchering a chicken for the night’s feast celebrating St. John the Baptist and the summer solstice. And things are immediately uncomfortably sexual: cue the “I’m not sure if I’m turned on or repulsed or both” dinner scene where Billie feeds undercooked chicken to Cata and Wren. Their dynamic is fascinating, if frustratingly underdeveloped, in a movie that would benefit from more explanation and time with its cast before it goes totally off the deep end into horror. 

Not quite a pure erotic thriller, Corpus’s blend of sensuality and sexual tension that constantly treads the line between uncomfortable and hot as hell is its biggest strength. Director and co-writer Corrin Evans has worked for years as an intimacy coordinator/choreographer on everything from Ti West’s MaXXXine to Yellowstone, and that experience shows on screen. The often surreal, seductively shot scenes between Sayo and Vince recall the best moments from Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse trilogy, the touchstone of ‘90s queer cinema. 

Corpus is sublimely sexy fun that leaves you wanting more in both ways good—I can’t wait for Evans’s next project and hope she goes full-on erotic thriller—and underdeveloped in that it wraps up too quickly and could have used more time to flesh out the mysteries behind its female protagonists. It’s definitely worthy of future queer midnight cult classic status, but it feels like it could have been the next Obsession if it had gone deeper on some of its explorations of gender and sexuality.