by MARK SLUTSKY

Maverick Canadian filmmaker Larry Kent’s latest, The Hamster Cage, first hit Montreal screens over a year ago at the 2005 World Film Festival, and now the film, which received some attention then for its general outrageousness, is seeing a theatrical release here.

It’s become weirdly commonplace to see Canadian films with themes as transgressive as their cinematic technique is conservative, and The Hamster Cage is no exception. The script is packed with incest, parricide, uncle-cide and pedophilia, but the movie looks and sounds like it belongs somewhere in the desert of Canadian TV, making for a very strange contrast.

Set in B.C., the film has siblings Paul (Tom Scholte) and Lucy (Jillian Fargey) returning to their family home (why are people always returning to their family homes to dig up dark secrets in Canadian movies?) to celebrate their scientist dad’s (Alan Scarfe) recent Nobel Prize win. Something is clearly wrong from the outset, as there seems to be massive resentment between pops and son, and Fargey and the family matriarch (Patricia Dahlquist) seem at odds as well.

But things only get worse when uncle Stan (Scott Hylands) appears, with student girlfriend Candy (Carly Pope) in tow. The lecherous uncle wastes no time in giving an eloquent defence of pedophilia (later, in the funniest scene in the movie, we learn he’s staged a revolutionary Oedipus Rex starring seven- and eight-year-olds) before Fargey, who he’d abused in the past, flips out and kills him. From there, the revelations, murders and general bad behaviour become as ubiquitous as the inescapable jaunty score, also the bane of so many English-Canadian movies.

Props to Kent for his gleeful indifference to taboo, but The Hamster Cage falters as satire, if that’s what it’s intended to be. The film’s black comedy doesn’t feel rooted in anything and, as such, the punches have little impact. Is the film taking aim at academics? Ambitious grad students? Families in general?

The stakes are unclear, and as we’re never given a chance to get attached to any of the characters—so rooted in their quirky or disturbing destinies as they are—it’s hard to get invested in this admirably strange, but ultimately unsuccessful effort.

The Hamster Cage opens this Friday, Oct. 13

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