Kissed

"Crossing over" -- that's what pale and freckled Sandra (Molly Parker) calls her obsession in this transgressive first-timer from Vancouver's Lynne Stopkewich. Sandra's not being euphemistic, just poetic, since she feels guilt-free about bedding down with the newly dead. "It's diving into a lake -- sudden cold and silence. Then bodies float shimmering."

Kissed begins with Sandra as preadolescent, already into sex and expiration, dancing a Bacchic rite in her undies in the woods, rubbing the blood of a deceased chipmunk about her neck. Later, as a young adult, she secures her dream job, employ at Wallis Funeral Home. That's where it finally happens, when Sandra climbs up, up on a table, and . . . ! This is a breathtakingly erotic sequence, ingeniously lit, staged, and orchestrated by Stopkewich. It works also because actress Parker brings such ingenuous conviction to her weirdo role. "You're so cold," she says, holding the waxy hand of a freshly departed. "That's okay."

In the last third of Kissed, Sandra gets a live boyfriend, Matt (Peter Outerbridge), and that's a drag, because his own nagging absorptions aren't nearly as interesting as Sandra's. Still, Kissed is more-captivating cinema from English Canada than David Cronenberg's Crash, and far sexier. At the Avon Friday and Saturday at midnight.

-- Gerald Peary