Insemnopédie : le rêve de Victor F. is a film that was inspired by the hallucinatory dream experienced by Victor Frankenstein on the night he had just completed the creation of the creature. A veritable fantasy of incest, this dream, reviving both the memory of a childhood love and the ghost of his dead mother, terrifies Victor as well as the creature awaiting him behind the bed’s curtain.

The film explores the broken and forbidden bonds between Victor and his creature, each mirroring the other. Between painting and photography, this black-and-white work is a sort of fantastical tale that raises the question of the power of sublimation. Is creation always restorative? Shot completely in a studio, the film opts for an artificial set, thereby harking back to the beginnings of cinema. The painted and printed mutant fabric appears both as the skin of the image and the shutter through which unfold scenes characterised by a Surrealist and even neo-Bunuellian aesthetic. The performances draw on an expressionist use of gesture inspired by silent films, while the sound created entirely in post-production and the hypnotic music, composed by Guillaume Durrieu, help to create a psycho-gothic world from which Mary Shelley’s original text emerges as the inner voice of Victor Frankenstein.