The film, directed by Andrew Repasky McElhinney, takes place in a seemingly abandoned house where a group of people engage in wordless acts of passion.
Following the 2016 death of Melissa Elizabeth Forgione, the star of Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye, director Andrew Repasky McElhinney stated, "She was a brave performer who was always willing to take risks.
"[5] In the essay "Realism, Real Sex, and the Experimental Film – Mediating Eroticism in Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye", Beth Johnson wrote that "McElhinney's vision can equally be likened to earlier, non-erotic appropriations of the transgression of reality such as The NeverEnding Story (Die unendliche Geschichte, Wolfgang Petersen, 1984), a film that shows the relay between reality and fantasy through the use of a joystick control, used to access other realms of/in space and time.
Interestingly, whereas McElhinney designates his work as film, conventionally the text appears to adhere to definitions of video art"[14] and that the "effect on the spectator can thus be perceived as a violent rocking motion, leaving the viewer with a feeling of disorientation, nausea, and fascination.
"[15] Johnson remarks that "McElhinney's vision in Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye is interesting in the way which it combines avant-garde filmmaking and underground, trash, queer, and explicit content.
It also allusively sketches in the history of eroticism from the nineteenth century to the present including the boredom that Bataille finds in 'the pleasures of the flesh' that are served up for delectation of decent people.