Though Bertrand Mandico’s She Is Conann defies genre and gender, at its bleeding and tinsel-wrapped heart it’s a perverse hero’s journey, a paganistic purgatorio. The film follows Conann through an underworld of her memories where she also exists as an elderly chthonic queen. Conann relives her life, reflecting on her strengths, loves, sins, and regrets. Rainer, her guide, succinctly describes the journey as "Tears. Revenge. And sex." She Is Conann features gorgeous sets and costume designs that balance art film and exploitation cinema qualities in a blend of fantasy, horror, and sci-fi.

Conann the Queen must dive into the River of Regrets, an anti-Lethe described by Rainer as "...the great leap of memory." To step down from her position she must find a human more harmful and cruel than herself. The exact mechanics of this cycle, Conann at death replacing Conann the Queen, are vague but reminiscent of Grecian Tartarus, where repetition of one's sins is a kind of hell. Rainer, a canine humanoid, is a mix of a horny Goofy and Anubis, an Egyptian God who led souls through the underworld. He guides Conann through six lives spanning different decades, from her birth and initiation into a barbarian clan to her time as a stuntwoman in 1998 New York; from a military leader in a nightmare apocalypse to an adored patron of the arts; and finally, to her ultimate status as Queen.

While the plot of She Is Conann is simple, its images are anything but. Mandico, a visual shaman, designs a surfeit for a cineaste. Images weave throughout the film, gaining and altering meanings, with symbols as fluid as the genders depicted. Barbarian chest plates from Conann’s early life become antiquated masks in her final “earthly” form as a wealthy art patron. Mandico laces particular lighting styles, mannequins, makeup, and hairstyles throughout different episodes in Conann’s life.

The film is a splintered hall of mirrors, with each fractured image reflecting Conann at different ages and performed by various actresses. Symbolically and thematically, Conann’s journey reflects various works of film, literature, and mythology. She Is Conann echoes films like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain, but Mandico’s visual sense is strikingly original. Though Jodorowsky explores feminine and masculine energies, Mandico’s figures are more queer and androgynous. Conann's journey through different ages parallels aspects of the Major Arcana, much like Jodorowsky’s use of the Tarot. The film also reflects Last Year at Marienbad in the statues in a neverwhere called the Hall of Time. Peter Greenaway’s work, such as A Zed and Two Noughts and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, is referenced in staging, on-set billboards, and music. At one point, Conann, dressed in suspenders with no shirt like Charlotte Rampling’s character in The Night Porter, acts as depraved as Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, and struts across an infernal abode similar to the soundstage hellscapes of Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond.

Mandico crafts a poetic language and visual grammar, making the internal external through visceral imagery like spitting blood and hacked bodies. The film represents Conann's internal memories performed externally, hovering between opulence and theatrical staging akin to the Grand Guignol. It’s reminiscent of Sergei Parajanov, one of the high priests and poets of Armenian and Soviet film, remaking C.H.U.D. II: Bud the C.H.U.D. The theatrical sets and black-and-white photography remind one of Guy Maddin but with more mud, blood, and glitter.

Mandico queers the Conan the Barbarian stories, themselves often strange but often boyish wish-fulfillment tales. But Mandico isn’t denigrating the stories. If readers go back to Robert E. Howard’s “The Tower of the Elephant,” they will see just how bizarre they were and how much Mandico revels in the strangeness of the source materials while adding his own quirks and fetishes. After all, Howard published stories alongside H.P. Lovecraft’s in Weird Tales. Mandico dives into this lineage with his own vocabulary and grammar. Much like the nomenclature—Yag-Kosha, Azathoth, Cimmeria—the rules can be made up as the action moves forward. Like Howard, Mandico isn’t afraid of jewels, monsters, or oozing viscera.

Bertrand Mandico's She Is Conann is a striking visual and thematic experience, rich in symbolism and narrative complexity. It writhes, glistens, and tears at the boundaries of fantasy and horror cinema.