Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s most unsettling film to date, Caniba begins as a portrait of a unrepentant murderer, the cannibal Issei Sagawa, as he returns to the past of his notorious crime: speaking of his 1981 killing, dismembering and partial consumption of a young woman whom he befriended while he was a doctoral student in Paris. Focusing closely upon Sagawa as he calmly recalls his crime and dark obsessions, and shares a manga recreation of his horrific act, Caniba lingers ever closer to its subject, rendering his fleshiness strange and unnatural. Just as it becomes almost unbearably intense, the film expands to become a diptych equally focused on Sagawa’s troubled brother Jun, whose own dark side sheds revealing light on the film’s larger subject: the prurient fascination with the supposedly debased and deranged that remains blind to the deep and implicating connections between the criminal outsider and the rest of society.