Co-written by performer Paul Couillard, and acted with bravura dedication with his partner Ed Johnson, Kisses is a wordless psychodrama, the third of the four-part House of Pain. It pictures a couple undertaking serious, bodily threatening playtimes, as first one, then the other, takes turns as abuser and avenger, in an alternating current of top and bottom.

“What does it mean that a film that depicts appalling scenes of torture, shit-smearing and the abuse of objects is beautiful?” Laura Marks

“The ritual nature of the dressing up and initiation are advanced in the next encounter which describes the protagonist tied up and hung by his ankles, then cut open. But when he is let down he is embraced by his torturer tenderly and the film’s function as a negotiator of fantasy and rebirth is underscored. In the final sequence of Kisses, the protagonist encounters a stranger while pissing in the hall of an abandoned and dilapidated industrial/institutional building. Among much menacing approaches between the two men, the protagonist shaves the other’s head with an electric buzzer and the two are intercut romping in a children’s playground. This third part to the film suggests a less apparent androgyny and connects art to the ability to transcend the physical and celebrate the spiritual through it, to reconnect with the childhood trust that allows the spirit to be fluent in speaking through the material world.” Tom Chomont