Cinematically, exploring the mind of a murderer has always been attempted with a proverbial veil of safe distance between the subject and the uncomfortable matter at hand.

Directors Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor attempt no such thing. Their latest movie, Caniba, is an unapologetically uncomfortable feature-length monologue by a murderer, about his murder.

Delivered by Issei Sagawa, who in 1981 killed and ate a woman named Renée Hartevelt in France, Caniba is uncomfortable, eerie and disturbing. Shot entirely in close-up, it features Sagawa retelling the story of how, when he was a 32-year-old PhD student at the Sorbonne, he invited Hartevelt, his classmate, to his Parisian apartment to work on a poetry assignment. Once at his apartment, he raped Hartevelt, shot her in the head and spent the next two days eating her dead body. Sagawa later attempted to dispose of the leftovers―if you can call them that―in a lake, and was arrested in the process.

The denouement―Sagawa’s eventual arrest and lack of prosecution, allowing him to continue living in Japan as a free man under the guise of insanity, is all the more chilling after listening to him deliver such nuggets as “Cannibalism is very much nourished by fetishistic desire” throughout the film.

Paravel and Castaing-Taylor, who previously directed Leviathan and Somniloquies, dispense the movie with disturbing intimacy, further pulling the curtain away from a subject most viewers would feel uncomfortable thinking about, let alone watching speak.

Ultimately, though, Caniba is a study in psychological pathos, and the extent to which audiences will tolerate Sagawa relies largely on how forgiving one is to his moral shortcomings. Parable and Castaing-Taylor appear to attempt to portray him as a deeply flawed, mentally disturbed protagonist who can nonetheless induce understanding on certain levels.

Many will not agree with this perspective, and will lament the lack of any deeper backstory or characterization, which is why the movie travailed through the festival season with a walkout-heavy run.

Caniba is, at the end of the day, uneasy, in-your-face and unforgiving and, in many ways, too self-aware to be smart.