The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009)

The Human Centipede (First Sequence) arrives as a Dutch body horror item from 2009, written and directed by Tom Six, and it conducts itself with the grim efficiency of a man assembling furniture from a diagram he drew himself. A retired German surgeon, Josef Heiter, kidnaps three tourists and stitches them mouth to anus. That is the film. Six has said he breaks out in a rash from too much political correctness, and the picture honors that position with a devotion we rarely see outside of religious orders. There is no lesson here, no thesis, no closing card directing us toward a helpline.

The cast is international by accident of plot. An American pair, a Japanese man, a Dutch trucker, a German villain. The Japanese victim sits at the front because Six wanted a language barrier, which is a structural decision dressed up as a character one. Heiter shouts racial slurs at him, and the villain's name is welded from those of Nazi doctors, Mengele included. This is shock imagery borrowed from history, not an argument about it. The film uses atrocity the way a set decorator uses a lamp.

The women exist to be mutilated and to die of sepsis. No arc, no agency, no reckoning. The movie is the opposite of a wellness pamphlet and has no interest in being anything else. It is a provocation staged in a rented villa, made by someone who wanted to know whether he could. We classify it accordingly.