Ecstasy

Originally titled “A Thought of Ecstasy,” this is a near impenetrable blur of quasi-apocalyptic sci-fi, cringe-worthy eroticism, torture porn, and wafer-thin mystery. German actor Rolf Peter Kahl (who also co-wrote and directed, under the name RP Kahl) stars as Frank, who is seen on the phone in an early scene, talking about a contract for a desalination plant in climate-imperiled Southern California. But the rest of the time he drives interminably on desert highways in a white T-shirt in relentlessly unforgiving heat (but never sweats) while constantly recalling an old lover named Marie he hasn’t seen in two decades. Typical of Kahl’s ill-advised efforts to crank up fever-dream kinkiness, we see Frank and Marie, in flashback, frontally nude and coupling on what looks like a rocky, Venusian hellscape. Frank is convinced that a newly-published memoir written under a pseudonym is, in fact, authored by the missing Marie, and he wants to find her. Deborah Kara Unger plays a purring ice queen who knows something about Marie and she directs Frank to a desert bunker, where Ecstasy enters a rabbit hole of forbidden fantasy. There are a few earnest strands in the scenes ahead in which an ordinary, attractive young woman named Nina (Ava Verne) is paid to be whatever a sex client wants her to be: punching bag, partner, or porn queen—but Kahl seems unable to make anything out of the opportunities here, flailing around in a genre-bending story that features some graphic sexual content. Not recommended. (T. Keogh)