Larva Mental (2020) is the title of the extreme film presented by Italian director Domiziano Cristopharo (House of Flesh Mannequins) and directed by newcomer Mikel Balerdi (born 1985), a Basque-born artist linked to the world of painting, tattoos and body suspension but also to the world of the most extreme body art, a field in which he is known for his shocking and powerful shows.
Somewhere between extreme and experimental cinema, Larva Mental is a mirror reflecting extreme body art as a form of transgression and expression, but more importantly, it is an excursion into the imaginative and dedicated mind of the director.
Mikel Balerdi writes, directs and stars in a film that is certainly untenable given the subject matter. In Larva Mental the human body becomes the artistic focus that reveals the complex inner world of the artist, who is able to externalize it with manifestations of all kinds and against all sense of modesty.
In this regard, the performer and director goes further by pushing into desecrating and desecrating practices of the human body, outraging religion and the meaning of life with clear provocative intent (SPOILER ALERT:                   Mikel Balerdi performs extreme and sacrilegious actions during a coprophilia sequence in which he actually uses a crucifix in his rectum causing lacerations resulting in feces and blood spilling out. In a later sequence, the author expels an object, resembling a dead fetus, from the aforementioned orifice. In another scene, however, they nails the genitals         END SPOILER.).
In Mikel Balerdi's actions there are alternating life and death drives but also sadistic tendencies and masochistic pleasure that plump up his most devastating destructive fantasies. His performances, however, have not only a documentary function but spring from a script of which Balerdi himself is the author.
The story of Larva Mental In fact, it features a man who goes away from home for days, leaving his daughter (Dairi Gaona) alone. The latter, after unwittingly finding footage of him in some extreme performances, writes him a farewell letter only to lose herself in the path of self-harm.
Returning from the long journey, the man will come to terms with his inner monsters and indulge in any form of self-destruction as an extreme gesture of physical and psychic punishment.
As well as being a cauldron of extreme bodily representations in which rituals of self-harm and nudity related to performance art prevail, Larva Mental is a place where drugs, incest and various paraphilias among which necrophilia is also present. In this regard, Balerdi's film recalls. Beyond the Darkness by Joe D'Amato while the colorful decomposing body (made by the director himself in collaboration with Dairi Gaona) seems to pay homage to that of the mermaid found by a painter in Mermaid in a Manhole, the fourth chapter of the Japanese saga Guinea Pig.
Larva Mental is not just an extreme film dedicated to the pain show hosted by Mikel Balerdi. It is also a film that stands out for its taste in aesthetics, color combination, and careful framing. Great details that testify to the artistic talent of the performer who, with Larva Mental, leaves a profound, indelible and astounding mark even in the world of the most brutal seventh art.
