Kissed (1996) on Netflix
Sandra Larson has been fascinated by death since childhood. She takes a job at a funeral home, studies embalming, and meets Matt, a medical student who develops feelings for her.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb6.4/104,217 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes68%
Trailer
Plot summary
Sandra Larson has been drawn to death for as long as she can remember. As a girl she danced at night with the bodies of dead animals, rubbing them against herself and then burying them, and the one friend who saw it, Carol, ended their friendship. At college she takes biology and dissects small animals, taking care not to disfigure them, and she finds work in a funeral home so she can be near the dead. The janitor, Jan, shares her belief that the dead still hold a soul. Mr. Wallis trains her in embalming, and she enrolls in mortuary science, where she meets Matt, a medical student who also studies corpses. Matt is intrigued by her absorption in death, and the two begin to date.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Kissed (1996)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Lynne Stopkewich wanted a blonde, "Doris Day type" lead and was struggling to cast the part when Molly Parker, a friend of cinematographer Gregory Middleton who had never met a woman director, read the script, performed it for her in person and won the role.
- The film ran out of money to develop its film stock, so shooting had to be finished in December when the National Film Board of Canada offered facilities to process and print the rushes; in the first week only select rushes were processed to check the filming was good.
- The film's source, Barbara Gowdy's 1992 short story, was itself inspired by the case of a young California woman caught in a necrophile act with a male cadaver in the late 1970s, the same case that first caught director Lynne Stopkewich's attention.
- To cut costs, Lynne Stopkewich used the production company's own office as a set: once painted and decorated, it served as both the funeral home interiors and Matt's basement apartment.
- Kissed's screening at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival was the first sell-out in the history of the Directors' Fortnight, and it was warmly received there.
- Stopkewich shot Sandra looking directly into the camera when she has an orgasm and lit that moment with a white light, so that audiences could watch one another's reactions and would be discouraged from walking out mid-film.
- Kissed was Molly Parker's breakthrough: she had only appeared in little-known Canadian television before, and afterwards landed a Variety cover plus the attention of directors Michael Winterbottom, István Szabó and Jodie Foster.
