Man Eating Pussy
Directed & Written by Lee Lawson
Starring Grace Glowicki & Julian Richings

Drama / Horror

★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

Lee Lawson’s Man Eating Pussy, which tied for Silver in the Best Canadian Short category at Fantasia 2026, involves a man (Julian Richings) meeting a woman called Kitty (Grace Glowicki) to make his final dream come true: “Birth in reverse.” The request is unique enough, then there’s the fact that Kitty’s a very unique woman herself. She offers something no one else can. For the man who comes to see her, she offers the sweetest release of all.

Man Eating Pussy is a brilliant short packed with so many ideas in—how do I word this?—a tight, gooey little package. Lawson uses a literary sense of grotesque to exaggerate the cis female anatomy, which will no doubt produce all sorts of readings; many will be insightful, though, sadly in the Golden Age of Terrible Media Literacy, just as many will be absolute dog shit. Man Eating Pussy is more than its prosthetic centrepiece. For me, it’s a philosophical, satirical, and sensual film that playfully, but honestly, uses body horror to approach how much control a woman’s vagina wields over men, and how men reduce women to little more than their genitalia.

While Lawson’s film obviously deals with cis womanhood in a vivid way, it’s one of the greatest films I’ve seen about the (cis) male sexual psyche. Man Eating Pussy is deeply Freudian, and slightly Jungian, as it confronts some of men’s deepest fears and darkest desires. The title alone is a playful phrase: it can be taken as a man who’s eating pussy, and simultaneously, probably most importantly, it can be taken as a man-eating pussy. The film is partly riffing on half of Freud’s Oedipus complex, as the man who comes to Kitty says she reminds him of his mother. Then the ending feels like it’s satirising Jung’s concept of the devouring mother crossed with male fears about the mythical vagina dentata. The French’s ‘la petite mort’ takes on compelling, tongue-in-cheek meaning when the film climaxes—or, rather, during the film’s climax (not sure that phrasing’s any better).

In terms of womanhood, Kitty can also be read as symbolic of the way the majority of men envision women, especially considering today’s school of misogyny led by troglodytes such as Andrew Tate: more or less, men view a woman as a walking vagina. Lawson’s use of the literary grotesque puts this idea on full display through the use of an elaborate prosthetic. Personally, I’m also sceptical about men who call it disgusting. Lawson provides us with what you can definitely say is a shocking visual, but it’s not meant to disgust, it’s meant to provoke a reaction, and depending on the reaction it should provoke further internal reflection regarding how each of us feels about women’s bodies.

Man Eating Pussy is an incisive work of art about desire and body politics. And frankly, if you’re a lover of vagina, it’s a wildly horny experience. Lawson’s film is transgressive since, even in 2026, women’s bodies, cis or not, are still unfortunately a sociopolitical battleground. Among other things, Man Eating Pussy reminds us of the vagina’s power, as it elicits so many different feelings and strong reactions, from lust to disgust to outright terror. If all else fails, for the men who watch Lawson’s short, it’ll be the first time so many of them won’t have trouble locating the clitoris when it’s, quite literally, staring them in the face.