Santa Sangre

Fenix is in an asylum. In flashback: a circus in Mexico City, a knife-throwing father, a mother running a heretical church dedicated to a girl who was raped and had her arms cut off, and a night that ends with a great deal of blood.

Then the mother, armless, directs her adult son from behind, and he performs her hands, including when she wants somebody killed.

Jodorowsky made it with Claudio Argento producing, and it is the film where his imagery serves a story rather than replacing one.

The elephant funeral, with a coffin the size of a lorry pushed off a cliff into a slum, is the sequence people remember.

It is truly about trauma and control rather than gesturing at them, and the final image is a release.