Somewhere in the distant past a girl rejects her calculus lessons in favor of Rimbaud and waits for the promise of true ecstasy, a sick thirst darkening her veins. In Maria Beatty’s feature film, Bandaged, the terror of biological family meets the lust of unmitigated lesbian desire, and both become unhinged.

Lucille wants to go to college to study poetry but is thwarted by her autocratic father and complicit grandmother who insist she study sciences. Desperate to escape her caged existence, she attempts suicide and is left disfigured but alive. Her father administers to her recovery and reconstructive surgeries at home and hires Joan, a nurse whose own secrets compel her to take the job. While Joan cares for Lucille in the father’s absence, the sterile pleasures of medical care and meticulously executed sponge baths rouse an otherwise defiant patient and a prurient love affair begins. But when corporal mutilations turn carnal, the attempt to prolong the affair takes on extreme measures.

Once again, Maria Beatty’s cinematic aesthetic recalls the experimental, symbolic, and sexually charged cinematography of Jean Genet and Kenneth Anger. With Abel Ferrara as executive producer and Jurgen Bruning as a producer, add to that aesthetic repertoire a pinch of exploitation, manipulation, excess and estrangement, and you’ve got a sense of the sexually charged vignettes that make up this highly seductive horror film. The short Crazy Baby features a disturbed patient, a hot nurse and a scary needle. — STEFANI CHARREN