Chris Cunningham

That was a penis. No, wait, maybe it's labia and a tongue. The Milky Way! Actually, hang on, perhaps that's real … milk? Chris Cunningham's images leave before you get a handle on the anatomy. Anyone who has seen his videos for musicians such as Aphex Twin sniggered at the announcement before the gig, which warned those expecting family entertainment to "run away". Cue a bulging close-up of a foreskin being rolled back, and a bloody, stylised punch-up between a nude couple; ironically buried in the hammering music was Donna Summer's I Feel Love.

It's thrilling and technically remarkable. While some film-makers devise a separate role for sight and sound, Cunningham obsesses over "Mickey mousing" every beat to perfection, creating a synaesthetic episode. And, like David Cronenberg, he meshes body and machine: Grace Jones becomes a real slave to the rhythm as her stomach twitches taut, defibrillated by the pulse in Cunningham's remix of William's Blood; a sleeping girl's face is yanked around in a grimly funny way by an invisible force that turns out to be a light fitting with a surgical mind of its own.

Strangely, though, even with the virtuosic grossness of 2005's Rubber Johnny – a giant wheelchair-dancing foetus who makes Elephant Man look tidy – there is more fleeting shock than real haunting. Perhaps, in all the synaptic mayhem, there is just no room for the viewer to contact their own demons. But in the newer work, such as New York Is Killing Me – in which Gil Scott-Heron's lolling head haunts a night cityscape, teeth shining with saliva, rail tracks rumbling – there is evidence of Cunningham's ability to be more than a sensational special effect.