This strange gem fits suitably in the creche of Cronenberg bit it's not for everyone that loves Cronenberg....Just the ones that are insanely in need of everything he has ever created. Its not because it's a bad film, on the contrary it is very intriguing. Its just incredibly slow and the sparse environment lack of color and mostly silent audio makes for a surreal but not very compelling film. There is no soundtrack...At all. There is no real dialog just moments of narration, which of course paints the picture moreso than the acting and mise en scene. Set in the Future, we are treated to a pseudo-documentary based on the scientific workings of a parapsychologist named Luther Stringfellow a famed member of the fictitious Canadian Academy for Erotic Inquiry. His thesis; It is hoped that telepathic groups, bonded in polymorphous sexual relationships, will form a socially stabilizing replacement for the "obsolescent family unit". The subjects will be seven young volunteers who will submit to experimental brain surgery to endow them with telepathic abilities and quench their ability to speak and be recorded daily. The film serves as a record of said experiment. This is where the film kinda falls down. The film gives us some interesting characters to watch, but their silence doesn't allow us to really know sympathize with them. Its like watching an acting class exercise in "emoting" or "mugging". A pantomime this complex needs some form of interpretive audio. While it is interesting to watch the actors go about their "telepathic" play, the drama comes off as stilted due to the highly scientific nature of the narration. Some long sequences that involve little or no narration do not pass quickly and create a kind of dream logic between film and audience. Are we getting what he is showing us? I dunno, as some of the action is so interpretive that we could be on a completely different plane of reasoning than what Cronenberg could be trying to describe. Heady, perhaps, but I think that Cronenberg was not trying to be pretentious, I think he was doing what a lot of first time film students do. Get in over their heads with grand ideas. I can forgive as I have done that myself, which is why I gave it 7 stars. Its not bad its just not for everybody.

2nd viewing. Alongside "Fast Company" on this fine Anchor Bay presentation are Cronenberg's first two experimental low-budget science fiction features, both filmed on a University of Toronto site in Scarborough, Ontario. I'd seen the first, Stereo on a poor-quality bootleg years ago and am pleased to report that not only does the film hold up to a 2nd viewing, the transfer is quite fine. The voice-over narration to the silent-shot black-and-white footage certainly lends some verisimilitude to the pseudo-documentary conceit of an experimental psych lab devoted to telepathy. Various colleagues of the para-psychologist Luther Stringfellow discuss his experiments and theories and how they bear out in a test group of young subjects apparently capable of various ESP abilities; we watch characters wander around alone or interact with each other individually or in small groups, and their strangeness (in particular one young vampirically-dressed man of rather odd visage) alternates between a sort of normal weirdness and something....else. Are they in fact gifted? Is the narration actually in sync with what we are seeing? Watch it and find out; uncommonly fascinating, if somewhat obtuse. Worthy of comparison with Greenaway's early pseudo-documentary shorts.

Unfortunately, this film is not a great Cronenberg. One can understand that he was only at his beginning and that he had a budget limited to make this film, but they are not the means only I criticize but rather the weakness of the scenario. One has the impression that it occurs nothing in this film. A long walk in corridors, a narration which leaves us on our appetite and not really of dialogs. Me, in what relates to me, I fought of all my forces not to fall asleep during the projection, which however, lasts only one hour. It will be understood that Cronenberg will have had all the time to make better films during following years.

"Stereo" is an underrated early Cronenberg movie. People tend to find it inaccessible on the grounds that it is 'boring', or due to its quasi-intellectual voice-over soundtrack (which was applied since Cronenberg did not have enough money to spend on soundtrack film) or 'incomprehensible' plot. The voice-over naturally enhances the feeling of "verfremdung", which can be argued as being for the good of the final result.The topic of a Canadian Academy for Erotic Inquiry is an extremely difficult one to pull off. The way it's made, however, with its austere milieu, its quasi-academic speaker voice and the contrasts between the harsh milieu and the characters' pursuit of the topic of the 'plot' makes it a rather good film its sparse conditions for creation considered, all the more if one is into austere films rather than bombastic ones. Hopefully some 'madwoman' or 'madman' will release a few copies of this movie on dvd, someday.