During a stopover in Germany in the middle of a carefree road trip through Europe, two American girls find themselves alone at night when their car breaks down in the woods. Searching for help at a nearby villa, they are wooed into the clutches of a deranged retired surgeon who explains his mad scientific vision to his captives' utter horror. They are to be the subjects of his sick lifetime fantasy: to be the first to connect people, one to the next, and in doing so bring to life "the human centipede."
This movie contains 77 potentially triggering events.
Only mentioned. A monologue towards the end has a character saying they 'left my child' while talking about their regrets in life, with no further specifics.
It's not stalking, but there is a scene where the main villain hunts down a girl while she is trying to escape/hide from him.
He's also very predatory towards both girls from the moment he is introduced.
Two of the centipede segments are women, who were friends from New York traveling across Europe. The one male piece is at the front, so they do not get lines after the centipede is made. Generally, the film plays with the potential anxiety of being a woman trapped with a dangerous man, which can be a trigger even before Heiter's intentions are revealed. There's also an early scene where the two women get sexually harassed by an older man as they try to ask for help with their car.
When the girls first arrive at Heiter's house, he pretends to call the car company by acting out a phone conversation. The camera shows us he is actually placing rohypnol into their drinks. Once his true nature is revealed he engages in various forms of psychological abuse and dehumanization of the centipede.
Heiter is shown drinking a few times, but never in a way that suggests abuse. (note that Germany's culture around drinking is noticeably more relaxed.)
while this is never shown in the movie itself, dr. heiter explains that at one point prior to the movie's events, he had conducted a similar "centipede" experiment on his three rottweilers. it's revealed that, due to this experiment, all the dogs had died.
The doctor mentions that one of the dogs attempted to escape before being turned into the centipede. No animals are actually shown in the movie except for a couple of pictures showing the dog centipede.
All of the victims are restrained before being sewn together, and once they are sewn together they are in a very restrictive position and struggle to move. They are also placed in a cage for a short period of time post surgery.
An early scene has the two female protagonists get sexually harassed when their car pops a tire, which prompts them to leave the car and end up at Heiter's. They are shortly after presented with drinks spiked with Rohypnol, which the antagonist outright describes as a 'rape drug'. One of the girls gets knocked out, but the other doesn't, leading to him forcefully using a syringe on her. While no one is ever actually raped, the centipede itself could be considered a form of violation with sexual undertones. It involves three unconsenting people being forced into permanently either having their mouths close to someone's anus and having to consume the waste, having someone else's mouth on their anus and having them consume your waste, or both.
Yes, by the centipede's very nature. The middle and third piece are surgically connected to the anus of the person in front of them by the mouth. The trucker character is also shown with a gag in his mouth.
Not in the movie itself, but apparently one of the inspirations was a dark joke about a way to karmically punish child molesters that involves surgery and a large trucker's rear. This is somewhat referenced by the opening scene, which features Heiter abducting a trucker. The trucker, however, does not become part of the centipede. The centipede itself, consisting of one man and two women, is played for horror.
Someone gets their throat bitten in self-defense, taking out a chunk of flesh that gets spat out (they survive this, but are clearly incapacitated). A major character dies by slitting their own throat in an act of defiance during the climax.
Three people get sewn ass-to-mouth by a crazed German doctor. That's the entire premise. It's graphic and not played for laughs. If the concept of a doctor surgically attaching three people into a connected gastric tract is enough to get you even just from the description, you may want to skip this one.
One of the girls, Lindsay, attempts to escape the doctor as he begins to sedate the segments of the centipede for the surgery. Since she is attached to an IV she rips it out, with her arm profusely bleeding for the rest of the scene. Later, Katsuro, the front piece of the centipede, ends his life by slitting his throat with a piece of glass.
Undertones of Nazism. The antagonist, Dr. Heiter, is a German doctor, and he performs unethical medical experiments. Fittingly, he shares a first name with Josef Mengele, an infamous Nazi-era physician known for his cruel experiments in Auschwitz. Heiter also specialized in separating conjoined twins before his retirement, which also further connects him to Mengele. No direct anti-semitism is present, but it's worth mentioning the three components of the centipede consist of two white women from New York and a male Japanese tourist, which may further tie into Nazi theming. One of the victims also insults Heiter by calling him a Nazi, and Heiter later insults the Japanese tourist by calling him things like 'kamikaze shithole.'
We see butts and bared breasts, as well as Dr. Heiter skinny dipping, but these are presented for horror. The first scene has a truck driver trying to relieve himself in the woods, only to be abducted; we see his rear from a relative distance. We get a surgery montage, which includes shots of the victim's rears being operated on. The centipede has bandages covering the lower halves of the segments while leaving the top half completely exposed, but the angles aren't too gratuitous. Dr. Heiter, as mentioned, skinny dips in front of the centipede which is intended as a form of dehumanization, since Heiter sees the centipede as a pet, not a group of human beings (this detail was suggested by the actor who plays him).
although it's not depicted in a sexual way, the acts of the movie bear clear resemblance to some branches of bdsm culture, and, in my opinion, were clearly made with fetish in mind. one of the character even yells at the antagonist: "this is your fetish, isn't it?"
Some time after the centipede is formed, it's revealed that Jenny, the last segment, is dying of blood poisoning. We see pus from her stitches, as well as her looking pale and lethargic. The movie ends with her passing, which doesn't bode well for Lindsay, the middle piece.
(SPOILERS) the movie ends with lindsay being the only survivor, as dr. heiter and the detectives were shot, katsuro committed suicide, and jenny succumbed to her fatal illness. since lindsay is the centerpiece of the centipede, she is left crying, her fate unknown.