Before he came to be known as one of the most intriguing peddlers of melodrama and complex character studies, Todd Haynes was a rambunctious young independent filmmaker with a penchant for the absurd and the constant desire to push the boundaries of the medium, which he did consistently for the first few years of his career. The two films that defined this period in his professional career are usually cited as being Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and [safe], two very different films that share many fascinating traits and have become definitive of a very specific kind of niche within the American arthouse that Haynes and his longtime friend and producer Christine Vachon (who began their lifelong collaboration by helping him fund this film) have dedicated their time to explore in vivid detail, this film being one of their many tremendous pairings. However, between the two is perhaps his most ambitious film and the one that essentially established him as an essential voice in American cinema. Poison has undergone a critical re-evaluation in recent years, being assessed as quite an audacious feature-length debut for a director who would not return to this style of filmmaking again (at least not in terms of structure), but who was experimenting with many ideas that would later come to be definitive of his entire career. Taking his cue from a number of texts by the iconic French writer and playwright Jean Genet, Haynes tells three stories, set in distinct periods and separated in nearly every way, but united through sharing an underlying socio-cultural commentary that speaks to many prominent issues at the time. Absurd and brilliant in how it tackles some truly intimidating material, and driven by a genuine sense of terror to which the director has yet to return, Poison is one of his most audacious pieces of filmmaking and one that speaks to a certain portion of the audience perhaps better than a lot of his other work.

The general structure of Poison is very simple – three distinct stories are told somewhat concurrently, the film weaving between them and presenting different scenes alongside one another in a way that juxtaposes certain thematic similarities (or contradictions in some cases), and where each one occupies a different genre. “Hero” is a parody of tabloid news, telling the story of a young boy who shoots his father and disappears. “Horror” is a pastiche of 1950s low-budget science fiction films centred around a scientist who manages to find some miracle elixir that he claims contains the essence of humanity, but which turns him (and everyone he subsequently comes into contact with) into grotesque lepers. “Homo”, which is the closest the film gets to adapting Genet in the form of drawing a lot of inspiration from his seminal classic of experimental cinema Un chant d’amour, is an artistic prison drama about two inmates who fall in love, interwoven with recollections of the protagonist’s coming-of-age in some faraway, pastoral paradise.  The three narratives are extremely different, and their diversity extends further than just the stories being told, but also the way Haynes adapts each one to take place in a very different genre, which is extremely challenging for any kind of anthology film, and doubly difficult for one in which the stories are not presented individually, but rather being blended together, the film leaping between scenes from the different segments in a way that is initially quite peculiar but makes a lot of sense when we step back and assess exactly what it is that this film was aiming to achieve, both narratively and theoretically, those ideas becoming more evident the further we venture into the heart of the film and come to understand its sometimes challenging but brilliant perspective which offers invaluable, and sometimes quite frightening, insights into society as seen by a true artistic renegade.

One of the elements of Haynes’ earlier career (and which has been widely discussed) is the perpetual conversation around identity, particularly queerness. As one of the most prominent queer filmmakers of his generation and someone who worked to tell these stories before it started to become a more common practice, Haynes had the responsibility of shepherding many deeply complex ideas into these films. Yet, he has never been known to be someone who feels particularly compelled to tell very traditional stories centring around LGBTQIA+ issues – even in more conventional dramas such as Far from Heaven and Carol, there is a degree of subversion that comes from the period setting. Poison features some of the director’s most ambitious ideas when it comes to discussing queerness as not only an aspect of human psychology but also its social component. These ideas are intricately woven into the fabric of this film, which aims to take a distinctively unorthodox approach to the material. Even the most intelligent of viewers are likely to feel some sense of confusion at different points throughout this film, and the only way to remedy this is to look at what is being presented on screen and try to correlate it to queer issues in some way – this helps clarify the underlying meaning, and even if Haynes and his collaborators were not propelled by a specific topic, there is still a general sense of complexity in every one of these segments that aligns with prominent perspectives on queer theory. It’s not surprising that the segment that has been most discussed over the years is the 1950s B-movie pastiche, in which a disease similar to leprosy begins to spread amongst society, leading to those infected becoming pariahs, rejected from society and being forced to die in shame. Considering when this film was made, it isn’t even necessary to spell out what this was likely referencing and many of the details we find throughout this film are equally as provocative, which is precisely why Poison feels like such a layered and challenging piece of filmmaking.

Conceptually, Poison is a tremendous film and one that has many astonishing ideas, but this is only a portion of what makes it so ingenious, and we would be remiss to only focus on the narrative and not mention the extraordinary filmmaking. Haynes is as exceptional a storyteller as he is a visual stylist, and when choosing to use Genet’s work as the foundation for three very different short films, he chose to make each one bespoke. The three segments of this film could all be standalone short films (although how they are structured is far more effective than had they been presented cohesively and in order, since the chaotic nature of leaping between different stories creates a lot of valuable juxtaposition), since they’re all varied in terms of visual detail. Haynes is a notable student of cinema, so he spends a lot of time developing each of these segments to pay tribute to a particular genre, and rather than just adding superficial elements, such as black-and-white cinematography for the B-movie pastiche or a mockumentary structure for the tabloid magazine parody, he makes sure that absolutely every element, from the photography to the sound design, reflects the specific genre being honoured. The best way to describe the experience of watching Poison is as if we are flipping between three channels on television, each one featuring a very different kind of programming, and the oscillation between the three creates a dizzying, surreal atmosphere from which the director draws many fascinating parallels between the three narratives, which are unrelated in terms of story, but share underlying details that are profoundly fascinating, and which are amplified by the impeccable filmmaking. The use of a mainly non-professional group of unknown or obscure actors adds layers of nuance to an already quite challenging narrative, since it lends it a sense of authenticity, making us genuinely believe we are watching lost media that has been compiled into this delightfully demented film.

Haynes’ intentions in crafting Poison are not clear, since he has never been a filmmaker particularly interested in overanalysis or spending too much time explaining what he meant in certain moments throughout his long and fascinating career. He’s always come across as a proponent of allowing the work to speak for itself, as well as ensuring that the audience’s interpretation factors into the narrative in some way or another as well. This is one of the many aspects that make Poison so compelling – it’s dark and sinister, frequently quite terrifying and aims to unsettle and provoke, but it never offers anything close to some reasoning for doing so, which forces us to look at the hideous image of society presented to us by Haynes, who weaves together a deeply disorienting, genre-bending film that shifts between science fiction, horror, dark comedy and romantic drama, all of which exist in harmony with one another as we undergo this process of queering society and its perceptions of itself. This is a fascinating film with many ideas that remain impenetrable and challenging even by contemporary standards, and while Haynes may have mostly softened in style and approached his later films with a more concise sense of direction, he remains radical and subversive, albeit just not in the way we see here, where the grotesque and manipulative exist alongside one another, serving to dismantle and redefine everything we thought we knew about social conventions, tearing them apart and rebuilding them to form his own unorthodox, macabre and bleak depiction of a society in decline. It doesn’t always make sense, but it very proudly carries itself with such candour and willingness to be bold, it is simply impossible to note admire Poison for its fearlessness and ability to capture our attention, despite the sometimes more harrowing nature of its already mysterious narrative and its underlying thematic content.