We're proud to present the world premiere review of Crisalida – The Origin (aka La Semilla, The Crysalid) on DarkVeins, the latest extreme film from Mikel Balerdi (Larva Mental, The Girl with the Cutter, Golgota).
Crisalida is a TetroVideo exclusive and serves as a prequel to Larva Mental, Balerdi's debut feature, widely regarded as one of the most extreme films of recent years.
Basque-born Mikel Balerdi comes from a background that spans painting, tattoo culture, and body suspension, but he is especially known for his work in extreme body art, where his performances are as shocking as they are intense.
As with Larva Mental, Balerdi channels multiple artistic forms into Crisalida, using the human body as both medium and language, a conduit through which pain becomes expression.
Alongside a disturbing, noise-driven soundtrack, Mikel Balerdi also handles the practical effects in Crisalida, pushing the most extreme sequences to a point where the line between reality and fabrication becomes almost impossible to trace.
Described by the director himself as more “scandalous and psychological” than Larva Mental, Crisalida reflects a clear step forward in both direction and performance, highlighting Balerdi’s ability to merge art and extreme cinema while crafting a suffocating, filthy atmosphere where provocation and transgression take center stage.
The chrysalis referenced in the title becomes a symbol of radical transformation, while the film's chapter-based structure reflects the difficult stages in the protagonist's journey (played by Balerdi himself).
Rather than leading to any form of rebirth, these phases culminate in a grotesque and abominable mutation, turning the idea of transformation into something deeply unsettling and irreversible.
Balerdi himself plays John, a deeply unstable man undergoing psychotherapy in an attempt to confront the harm he has inflicted on both his wife and himself over the years, but what unfolds is nothing but his psychological collapse.
Through a series of flashbacks, he gradually exposes the darkest corners of his psyche, revealing a growing inner horror that seeps into his actions and thoughts, becoming increasingly twisted and unhinged.
Crisalida unfolds as a relentless chain of ordeals that invade every corner of the couple's intimacy, extending from sexuality to autoeroticism, from birth to death. The latter, in particular, becomes a central fixation, framed within a chilling necrophilic context where decomposition is laid bare and intertwined with explicit sexual acts.
The desecration of the body and the sacrilegious gestures that follow may recall the two Nekromantik films, but Crisalida pushes even further, amplifying the sense of sickness through meticulous detail and strikingly realistic effects. The atmosphere is thickened by an old-school visual touch that gives the imagery a raw, tactile quality, while the presence of a figure covered in black body paint turns death into something profaned, radiating decay on both a physical and spiritual level.
All of this turns Crisalida into a hellish concentration of inflicted and self-inflicted pain, a disturbing spectacle built on images that are as grotesque as they are strangely mesmerizing.
Balerdi delivers a film that is both outrageous and deeply artistic, channeling his background in performance and body art into a work that revolves around the control, exploration, and staging of pain.
With its singular vision, Crisalida forces its way into cult territory, standing out as a defining piece of the genre for the way it merges some of the most perverse and unsettling imagery in extreme cinema with a form of expression that is unapologetically raw and provocative.
In the cast: Mikel Balerdi, Xochitl Espinoza and Traian DC.
Special effects are by Mikel Balerdi in collaboration with Nochitl Spinoza, Christian Quiroz and Mauricio Alvarez B.
