10 WTF Moments In Film You Won't Believe They Got Away With

3. Mr Merde

The Film: Holy Motors (2012) Leos Carax's bonkers fever dream is a tour de force in provocative but entertaining film-making. When it played first in Cannes last year, it inspired a huge number of walk-outs within the first half hour, as it became clear that Carax had no intention of presenting a logical, or even coherent narrative arc, in favour of presenting beautifully executed, but beyond-insane vignettes exploring a mysterious central character with very little link to the real world. In a collection of sublimely weird moments, the weirdest, and the one which inspired the most walk-outs in my screening was the sequence devoted to Mr Merde, a deliriously odd creation who lives beneath the city of Paris, and emerges to horrify and terrorise citizens. This agenda leads to the ginger-haired hobo to kidnap Eva Mendes' model, who he takes back to an underground lair, strips off to reveal an erection (prosthetic apparently) and proceeds to eat her hair, for absolutely no fathomable reason. Prosthetic or not, the presence of that invading glans was as shocking in Cannes as its inevitable (but unrealised) cut was from subsequent versions. To be fair, it could well have got through because it represented no real threat, being in an impenetrable film with too many arthouse credentials to get a mainstream release, and being wielded by a character more content with eating hair.