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Feed

By Terry Sherwood | April 23, 2025

Brett Leonard’s Feed is intense, literally stomach-churning in moments, but it’s memorable. Like The Sadness, A Serbian Film, Nekromantik, The Human Centipede series, or even the Italian cannibal exploitation films of the early ’80s like Cannibal Ferox, this picture dares viewers to endure it. It’s grotesque, mean-spirited, and morally degrading, depending on your appetite for such items.

The plot follows Michael Carter (Alex O’Loughlin), a soft-spoken but psychotic “feeder” who looks like a young David Hemings, runs a fetish site catering to men obsessed with extreme obesity. He keeps women bedridden and dependent, overfeeds them into immobility, streams the consequences, and takes bets on when they’ll die. His followers pay to watch this destruction happen in real time. Australian cybercrime detective Phillip Jackson (Patrick Thompson) stumbles onto the site and tracks Carter to Toledo, Ohio, determined to shut him down—but increasingly disturbed by his unraveling psyche.

“…he keeps women bedridden and dependent…”

Feed doesn’t just portray body horror—it thrives in it. But the film’s real focus isn’t just fresh power. Sex in Feed is never tender, never mutual. It’s domination. Whether it’s Carter seducing his victims into submission or exploiting their vulnerability, or Jackson’s own fractured, repressed impulses surfacing in ugly ways, sexuality is used like a weapon. It’s brutal and transactional, making it feel less about pleasure than control.

Food and the enjoyment of meals function the same way. In Feed, it’s not nourishment, but seduction, and punishment. Carter uses food like a chef who appears on various streaming channels as they curate an experience, but here, the “experience” is a slow death. The way Carter crafts meals, smooth talks the calorie counts, and performs for the webcam is similar to how” Foodies” speak about cuisine. He’s not feeding these women—he’s sculpting them. Their suffering is his art. The parallel becomes clear: just as a Michelin-starred critic can make or break a restaurant with a review, Carter holds godlike influence over life and death through his obsessive control of consumption.

Detective Jackson, meanwhile, isn’t much of a hero. He’s emotionally stunted and sexually conflicted, and as his investigation deepens, he becomes just as obsessed as the man he’s hunting. In trying to understand Carter, he starts to resemble him. The film plays with this moral mirroring—both men driven by compulsion, both using women in different but equally damaging ways. There’s no moral high ground in Feed—just wreckage.

Feed (2005)

Directed: Brett Leonard

Written: Patrick Thompson, Alex O'Loughlin, Kieran Galvin

Starring: Alex O'Loughlin, Patrick Thompson, Gabby Millgate, etc.

Movie score: 7/10

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"… Provoke reaction as it makes the viewer complicit in its depravity..."

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