Honestly the only reason I can’t recommend this film is because I know a lot of people can’t handle it. Those surgery scenes are going to be rough for a lot of people. But the surgery is part of what makes this film so fascinating. It explores multiple facets of several elements of society in the future: how we engage with pain and pleasure in a world where neither is necessary; what does art become when human form and function become mediums for expression; how a capitalist society results in selling solutions to problems created by previously marketed solutions; how many of these things serve to create destabilizing forces for the government, and what its inevitable responses must be.

A fascinating way these different ideas are explored is through an almost entirely agentless main character. As an undercover cop he carries out his handler’s commands. As the canvas for a surgical genre of performance art he goes under the knife. As a sufferer of an unknown malady he is subject to many would be cures and devices that take away much of his humanity in order to preserve his life. The ways in which modern (or future-modern) society disempowers us are explored through a character who seems to be at the top of the world but is merely a tool by which powerful institutions — art, medicine, government — manifest their respective visions for society.

This is quite possibly the greatest film I’ve watched this year. Well, at least one of the greatest films I’ve watched this year made within the last decade.