The film opens in a modest rehearsal‑space where a small theatre company of six amateur actors has gathered to mount a staging of the play The Insect Play (by Karel Čapek and Josef Čapek). At first the actors go through familiar motions — reading lines, discussing their roles, rehearsing scenes of anthropomorphised insects with human flaws such as greed, jealousy and selfishness. But soon the boundary between their lives and the insect‑metaphor they perform begins to blur: the actors start to behave like the creatures they play.
As rehearsal progresses, surreal and unsettling events intrude: insects appear in unexpected places, life‑size props and costume pieces swirl into bizarre transformations, and the actors’ identities shift. One actor, costumed as a dung‑beetle, begins obsessively rolling a ball; another, playing a parasite, becomes monstrous in his hunger; the director character morphs into a cricket‑like tyrant dominating the group. These metamorphoses mirror the actors’ psychological unraveling and suggest that human society is little more than an anthill of competing drives and tiny horrors.
Meanwhile the film simultaneously pulls back the curtain: we see behind‑the‑scenes footage, interviews with the actors about their dreams, and glimpses of the film‑making machine itself. In this meta‑layer the viewer watches the mechanics of the rehearsal, the camera crew, the lighting rigs, the actors stepping out of character to talk about insect nightmares and their own anxieties. This dual structure—play within film and film about the play—adds to the disorientation and underscores the director’s interest in process, illusion and transformation.
Thematically, the film uses the insect motif to satirize human life: the ants, beetles, parasites and larvae of the play become shorthand for humans trapped in routines of work, reproduction, violence, and hierarchy. The world the film depicts is cynical: human ambition, sexual jealousy, bullying, and consumption are laid bare under the microscope, suggested to be no different from the instinctual drives of bugs. Director Švankmajer openly states that he considers contemporary civilization to resemble an anthill.
In tone and style the film is hallucinatory and bleak. The acting is deliberately stilted, the mise‑en‑scène often claustrophobic, the camera frequently locked on grotesque close‑ups of props or insect‑costumes, and the editing intercuts dream‑like sequences with rehearsal scenes. The result is unsettling: one knows one is watching something symbolic rather than straightforward. The film does not aim to comfort; rather it provokes reflection on the nature of performance, identity and the fuzzy line between human and insect.
In the end, the rehearsal collapses into chaos. The actors are trapped in versions of their insect‑roles, the theater set becomes a web of metamorphoses and breakdown, and the viewer is left with an image of civilization as absurd, insect‑like and perhaps doomed. There is no neat resolution or moral uplift; instead the film says that our routines, hierarchies and hidden drives may be more insectile than we like to believe. Insect is therefore less a narrative film and more a surreal meditation on identity, performance and society.
