Subconscious Cruelty is divided into four disconnected short segments, each with its own narrative and themes:
Ovarian Eyeball
The film opens with a brief, unsettling sequence in which a man dissects a woman, removing an eyeball from her belly, a stark image that sets the tone for the anthology’s exploration of deviance and violation.
Human Larvae
A young man named Brother narrates the troubling events, revealing an obsession with his Sister who has just become pregnant by her husband. He watches the couple intently from behind a door, silently masturbating, and confesses a belief that semen is a kind of gift of creation while he views female menstruation as a cruel joke. [Brother] goes on to reveal a deepening psychosis, insisting that his sister’s pregnancy makes him lose interest in her and that he plans to enact the ultimate act of violence within the act of creation itself. During her birth, he assists in the delivery, but as soon as the child is born, he slits its throat with a knife and leaves the blood on her face in a moment of horrific spectacle. The sister bleeds to death, and the brother fashions an altar for the infant in the sink, wrapping the baby in cloth and letting it rot there. He later admits that his sister’s body has remained where it lies and that he sometimes sleeps beside her. The segment closes with him confessing that he even contemplated necrophilia, but found the moment too lifeless to continue.
Rebirth
On a grass-covered plain, a crowd of nude figures writhe together in a ritual-like display of ecstasy. They caress and dig into the soil, which bleeds heavily as they enact sexual acts with the earth and with nature itself, a visceral tableau that links fertility, decay, and the earth in a single disturbing tableau.
Right Brain/Martyrdom
The final segment opens with a Businessman driven by faith who is consumed by masturbation and a habit of watching explicit material. He is tormented by a nightmare in which his doppelganger drives four fishhooks into his penis as they are pulled free. A woman's hand appears to continue the sexual act, ejaculating blood as his flesh is progressively torn, until his penis is skinned. The doppelganger melts a crucifix and mixes its contents into a syringe, which is injected into his forehead, leaving him presumably dead. In another corner of the town, a man who resembles Jesus stands naked and bleeding before a church, pleading with those inside. The church doors open, and three nude demonic women drag him inside, where they torture and devour him, forcing him to eat his own flesh as they engage in cannibalism, tear out his heart, and urinate on his corpse. They pour wine over him in reference to the body of Christ before they begin having sex with his guts, by now dead. The sequence ends with the brutal image of the man being impaled through the anus by a stick, and the screen cuts to black.
