I was genuinely, in the best sense, jaw-dropped.

| Feb 16, 2019

Ultimately, you just don't really care what happens to these two, and the additions of trippy hallucinations, mid-level bondage, tentacled minibeasts and lines such as "I want you to wear my skin" don't help.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 15, 2019

Ending just as its long-teased crescendo of reciprocal madness begins, Piercing is a little too smart for its own good.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 15, 2019

The dream-team pairing of Abbott and Wasikowska, two of the most interesting, subtle and risk-loving performers of their generation, is a huge compensation.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 15, 2019

The result is a film that is far more accessible and entertaining than its storyline would lead you to expect.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 14, 2019

For those who prefer their cinema trussed up and slobbering on a ball gag, Piercing provides an hour and 20 minutes of nasty fun, though it occasionally feels like a great short stretched out beyond its optimal length.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 14, 2019

For every clever twist, there's a dead giveaway; the movie's high-style décor is more alluring than the drama.

| Feb 4, 2019

Piercing is an unnerving mix of loveliness and lunacy.

| Feb 1, 2019

Piercing is an unsuccessful provocation, and I didn't get anything out of it beyond a few wispy ideas about how we may never really understand what we want from each other.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Feb 1, 2019

What a deliciously demented and disturbing drama Nicolas Pesce's "Piercing" is, dripping with gore and laden with forbidden innuendo.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 1, 2019

Pesce deploys a potent arsenal of stylistic tools - urban landscape miniatures, plushly disquieting Lynchian interiors, flashbacks, creature effects, and florid gore - to tell the story of Reed.

| Jan 31, 2019

Pushing the concepts of consensual BDSM to their very furthest extremes, Pesce's curious, stylized, and perversely erotic romance will inevitably make the audience flinch.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 31, 2019

Ultimately, it's just a gorgeous, gruesomely wrapped package with little inside.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 31, 2019

The movie gains momentum as it indulges in hallucinogenic phantasmagoria. Whatever you make of its intentions, it's certainly exceptional in its visual distinction.

| Jan 31, 2019

As much an interesting subversion of how sex workers have been depicted in film as it is an off-putting erotic drama that falls apart at the seams.

| Jan 30, 2019

The movie turns ugly, but the ugliness hasn't been earned.

| Original Score: B- | Jan 29, 2019

A sick-joke psychological cat-and-mouse game with just enough twists to keep you on your toes.

| Original Score: B- | Jan 29, 2019

It has to be said that the lead performances are impressive and Wasikowska confirms once again that she's a bold and innovative talent.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 4, 2019

Nightmarish fantasies and flashbacks hint at the reasons for what we're seeing, while attempting to dilute the blood with gallows humour, but for its all its artfulness, the film remains a singularly depressing experience.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 21, 2018

A psycho-sexual horror show which lifts the lid on the twisted urges of two very troubled characters. It's great, if grisly, fun.

| Jan 30, 2018