Death and desire, or more specifically, sex, have been linked on screen before, but never like this. Banned in the UK and based on Barbara Gowdy's short story We So Seldom Look on Love, Lynne Stopkewich's debut feature is a quietly electrifying film about one woman's life-long fascination with death, from a childhood filled with elaborate burial rituals for dead animals to an adulthood monomaniacally devoted to getting ever closer to the dearly departed objects of her affection.  

Molly Parker is virtually luminescent as Sandra Larson, a pretty-girl-next-door type who also happens to be a necrophiliac working as an apprentice embalmer at a funeral home. Peter Outerbridge (Paris, France) plays a wonderfully edgy Matt, the lonely and intense medical student who tries to compete with Sandra's other 'lovers' for the ultimate place in her heart.  

Gorgeous camera work and art direction help vividly illuminate both the corporeal and spiritual aspects of Sandra's obsession - we can almost see and feel the life force she seems to draw from the energy cast off by her cherished bodies. Gowdy excels at unsentimental yet sensitive portrayals of human deviance - shaking our entrenched notions of normalcy - and with Kissed Stopkewich manages to delicately, confidently and with disarming emotional honesty capture that same elusive quality.  

Considering the potentially absurd and sensational nature of the material, it is no small part of Kissed's achievement that it keeps us both fascinated by and sympathetic with Molly without ever asking us to pass judgment on her. Unusual, to say the least, but also indisputably impressive. 

Geoff Pevere, The Globe and Mail