'De Humani Corporis Fabrica' Review: Fascinating Deep Dive Into Hospital Practice Shows the Body as a Temple, a Dreamscape and a Battleground

'De Humani Corporis Fabrica' Review: Fascinating Deep Dive Into Hospital Practice Shows the Body as a Temple, a Dreamscape and a Battleground,The latest documentary from Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 'De Humani Corporis Fabrica' journeys into bodies under medical invasion.

‘De Humani Corporis Fabrica’ Review: Fascinating Deep Dive Into Hospital Practice Shows the Body as a Temple, a Dreamscape and a Battleground

It’s nearly 30 years since the global franchise of Body Worlds exhibitions — collections of dissected and plastinated human cadavers, equal parts science lesson and carnival attraction — racked up ticket sales and stoked controversy in multiple international markets. Anatomist (or ringmaster) Gunther von Hagens professed to display the body as it had never been publicly viewed before, and there was certainly a lurid fascination to Body Worlds’ vision of what we look like under the skin. That sense of revelation is recalled in Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s extraordinary new documentary “De Humani Corporis Fabrica,” which likewise delves dizzyingly beneath the flesh to show organs, systems and actions that we know are inside us, but tend to keep tidily out of mind.

But where the Body Worlds exhibits were lifelessly embalmed, missing the crucial dimension granted by breath and motion, “De Humani Corporis Fabrica” — named for Andreas Vesalius’ landmark 16th-century anatomy books, and translating to “of the structure of the human body” — takes us into the living, heaving, breathing body, using microscopes, ultrasounds and endoscopic and scialytic cameras to present its inner workings about as vividly as any nonfiction film has ever managed. Intestines are shown as wet, enveloping, worm-pink tunnels; blood cells jostle and dance in marbled formation like kaleidoscope particles. There’s a psychedelic spell to this imagery that suggests a state-of-the-art “Fantastic Voyage,” except there’s no fantasy here: Every body probed is a real-life patient at one of several Parisian hospitals, their life hanging in the balance as we gawk at their insides.

If “De Humani Corporis Fabrica” were merely a morbid corporeal spectacle, preoccupied with the body’s dazzling mechanics rather than the life it sustains, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s film would risk a certain exploitative hollowness. But the filmmakers, longtime collaborators at Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, maintain a fine balance between science, showmanship and genuine human interest in their first feature since 2017’s jolting cannibal portrait “Caniba”: It is as compelling when it stays outside the body, observing the daily routines and crises of hospital life on and away from the operating table, as when it plunges trippily in.

Given its assorted European derivative words, the term “fabrica” also connotes a factory — a metaphor relevant both to the film’s presentation of our own complex flesh-and-bone machinery, and to the medical facilities where human life is forged, repaired and terminated. Paravel and Castaing-Taylor investigate in parallel the systems and structures that keep both factories running, though they haven’t a methodical, Frederick Wiseman-style interest in institutional order and structure. Rather, “De Humani Corporis Fabrica” thrives on the chaos of nature and the disorder of public healthcare alike: a chain of interior and exterior strains and failings through which the body labors to prevail.

Whether in or out of the body, the filmmakers favor tight framing, expressionistic lighting and unexpected angles that frequently make the viewer work to figure out exactly what’s being shown — or withhold critical visual information, as in one startling scene where we focus on a man’s quietly anxious face as surgery is carried out on him, only for the camera to gradually reveal the incision being made into his brain. This is a film that tests the fortitude of even strong-stomached viewers: Little in the body-horror or torture-porn genre matches the cold shock of certain operating sequences here, whether it’s a medical drill winching its way into a man’s urethra (“Try the ballistic setting, see if it’s better,” an unseen doctor instructs, none too encouragingly), or a corneal invasion during eye surgery that achieves the effect of Buñuel’s “Un Chien Andalou” without any visual trickery.

Yet there’s a point to these visual provocations beyond blunt visual impact: “De Humani Corporis Fabrica” notes at every turn the vulnerability and fallibility not just of the human body, but of its intended protectors in the medical world. Doctors and nurses aren’t romanticized here as life-saving superheroes, but as exhausted drones fumbling their way through an inadequately supported system, often making bad calls, their own bodies faltering in the process. In one scene of appallingly dark real-life farce, an under-qualified surgeon admits he has no idea what he’s doing as a prostate operation goes bloodily awry. Elsewhere, unseen doctors dully bemoan their own hand injuries and erectile dysfunction as they attempt to mend others, while fatigued morgue attendants cackle with laughter as they absentmindedly put back-to-front underwear on a newly departed corpse.

Against such reality, the film’s burrowings into vividly colored arteries and bodily byways — with the chatter and clatter of the operating room, in a witty flourish of sound design, muffled into gibberish — feel a positive escape. But there’s release in the outer world too, in a surprisingly giddy finale where off-duty hospital staff smoke, drink and dance to, aptly enough, Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” at a colleague’s leaving party, before the soundtrack shifts to New Order’s “Blue Monday” and the camera drifts to an obscene wall mural of medical professionals in flagrante delicto. Searingly and sometimes hilariously humane even as it makes an exquisite alien landscape of our insides, this exhilarating film ultimately sees the body, even at its most pained and prodded, as a vibrant, vital instrument.