For Anthony Perkins, Henry Jekyll could have been a role to kill for. Going all-in as a malnourished, overworked bastard child of Victorian modernity, he evokes the politically ambiguous high of misplaced hedonism as an individualistic revolt from the demented domesticity of modern life. He is a fugitive Dionysian, alive to the otherness beneath the mundane, attentive to the constrictions of the society that bred him. Perkins was promised a beautiful career in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, an offer undone by being a mainstream outsider. His rise reflected a youth-obsessed America where inner resistance took the form of unleashing libidinal anima, a compulsive frustration bristling at the complacency of the world and the unearned hubris of a nominally maintained composure. Now at the end of his life, having spent decades lost in the fugue of modernity, Perkins plays Dr. Jekyll as the man who didn’t, a soldier of scientific progress who went right into the middle of the road and who, in a sudden flash of dark discovery, realizes what accepting one’s otherness might have looked like. In one of his final roles before his HIV diagnosis, he allows his body to summon the dangers of a science unable to acknowledge its inattention to humanity.

Essayed in Edge of Sanity, he’s a diagonal man, a cracked mirror of a fellow who seems to sidle easily through the canted angles of the camera and the warped streets that are refractions of an askew personality. His character is an outsized parody of heterosexual culture lost in a frenzied, foggy haze between its inner energies and the norms policing its modes of expression. Jekyll’s laboratory is an antiseptic, an encasing emptiness that, lit with soap opera luminescence, makes the height of modern knowledge look all the cheaper and more artificial, no honest way for a soul-bearing human to make a living. Mr. Hyde’s life, conversely, is scintillating and sensual, a toxic deluge of rampant feelings and sinister, Dionysian urges run amok over societal pretension and uncritical domesticity. He’s Adamic, an incantatory vision of a new man as a sidewinding flaneur who smuggles in individual lust as a contraband craving for knowledge, an impulse for truth beneath the calcifications of middlebrow culture.

Edge of Sanity ultimately explores a crepuscular world of light and darkness, of acceptable order and forces of disarray. It also frames the late 19^th century as a premonition of Reagan-era hypocrisy, a feverish swamp of frustrated desires masked by fictions of order. The earlier era’s miasmic aura of addictive hyperbole and immediate pleasure suggests a dementedly zealous individualism that echoes in the 1880s, the 1960s, and the late ‘80s “end of history” egotism, a world in which society is understood to be the bane of humanity. The cauldron of bubbling desires that individuals exert come at others’ expense, not as an invitation to mutual solidarity and collective experimentation but as a mechanism of unhinged atomism.

It’s easy to feel enveloped by Edge of Sanity’s own diabolical energies, although, as with many hedonistic slashers, the texture and grain can be more intoxicating than the implied argument. At times, the film suggests a masochistic denunciation of promiscuity. Occasionally, it achieves a more pointed, political rendering of the means by which potential forms of real social liberation become narrowed into oppressive channels and assert themselves onto social outcasts. But the texture is killer, a neo-expressionist smorgasbord of tormented angles, slashing shadows, delirious and demented tracks and camera movements courtesy of cinematographer Tony Spratling. Director Gerard Kikoine never established himself in any substantive way, but he corrals a murderer’s row of cinematic killers here, slicing modernity to bits. Editor Malcolm Cooke cuts not between contiguous spaces but mental postures and imaginative worldviews. The kills themselves are an odd mixture of minimalism and maximalism, relatively bloodless but shivering with disturbance, straight-laced but oddly mischievous. Something seems to want to explode and disperse itself in the film, some repressed energy that wants to envelop the film with a monstrously destabilizing intent. It’s a neurotic narcotic of a text, an insurgent current that discovers repression in liberation, that recognizes new modes of control latent in apparent mechanisms of escape.

Score: 7.5/10