Fast Company (David Cronenberg, 1979)

Cast: William Smith, Claudia Jennings, John Saxon, Nicholas Campbell, Don Francks, Cedric Smith, Jody Foster, Robert Haley, George Buza, David Graham, David Petersen, Chuck Chandler. Screenplay: Phil Savath, Courtney Smith, David Cronenberg, Alan Treen. Cinematography: Mark Irwin. Art director: Carol Spier. Film editor: Ronald Sanders. Music: Fred Mollin. 

A cheesy racing flick with a low-wattage cast and not much suspense from a surprising director, Fast Company doesn't have much to offer anyone except devotees of David Cronenberg who will try hard (and probably fail) to see signs of auteurship. It's so carelessly put together that at one point you can see that the image has been flopped because the "Goodyear" logo on a character's cap is reversed. The mediocrity extends to a song score by composer Fred Mollin that sounds like it's ripping off "Born to Run" -- Springsteen couldn't be persuaded to provide the real thing. 

Early David Cronenberg

Clara Mayer in Stereo

Stereo (David Cronenberg, 1969)

Cast: Ronald Mlodzik, Jack Messinger, Paul Mulholland, Iain Ewing, Arlene Mlodzik, Clara Mayer, Glenn McCauley. Screenplay: David Cronenberg, Cinematography: David Cronenberg. Film editing: David Cronenberg. 

Ronald Mlodzik in Crimes of the Future

Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg, 1970)

Cast: Ronald Mlodzik, Ronald Mlodzik, John Lidolt, Tania Zolty, Paul Mulholland, Jack Messinger, Iain Ewing, William Haslam, Raymond Woodley, Stefan Czernecki, Rafe Macpherson, Willem Poolman. Screenplay: David Cronenberg. Cinematography: David Cronenberg. Film editing: David Cronenberg.  

I can't imagine there's much of an audience for David Cronenberg's Stereo and Crimes of the Future (a title he reused in the 2022 feature, which borrows an element of the 1970 film but otherwise has no resemblance to the first one) except among film scholars and passionate devotees of his work. They look like the work of a film school student, although Cronenberg was teaching himself how to make movies at the time. Both are silent except for voiceovers that do what they can to give the images a narrative shape. In the case of Stereo, there's very little of that: The voiceovers sound like excerpts of lectures given by social science professors about a research project concentrated on telepathy and sexuality. Crimes of the Future has a more complex narrative line, as Adrian Tripod (Ronald Mlodzik), a dermatologist who heads a clinic called the House of Skin, tells about the attempts to halt a plague caused by cosmetics. It's a creepier film than Stereo, more in the line with Cronenberg's later work, with a nice performance by Mlodzik, who appeared in several of his films before entering the clergy.    

Rabid (David Cronenberg, 1977)

Cast: Marilyn Chambers, Frank Moore, Joe Silva, Howard Ryshpan, Patricia Gage, Susan Roman, J. Roger Periard, Lynne Deragon, Terry Schonblum, Victor Désy, Julie Anna, Gary McKeehan. Screenplay: David Cronenberg, Cinematography: René Verzier. Art direction: Claude Marchand. Film editing: Jean LaFleur. 

David Cronenberg admitted he had trouble writing the screenplay for Rabid, and it shows. The movie begins promisingly in a somewhat isolated plastic surgery clinic in Quebec, where the surgeon, Dr. Keloid (Howard Ryshpan), is persuaded to try a new technique whose side effects are still unknown. When a young woman named Rose Miller (Marilyn Chambers) is seriously injured in a motorcycle accident near the clinic, he decides to use the technique to save her life. Rose lingers in a coma after the operation until she wakes up screaming one night with a serious hunger for human blood. The surgery has somehow left a sphincter-shaped organ in her armpit, from which a kind of stinger emerges that allows her to feed on other people. The victims wake up with no memory being attacked but with a similar hunger, and they swiftly go mad, infect others, and die. Rose escapes from the clinic and makes her way to Montreal, spreading the plague behind her. Rose doesn't suffer the madness and death that her victims do, so nobody suspects that she's the carrier of what is initially diagnosed as a new strain of rabies. Rose's story should provide a steady through line for the film, but Cronenberg gets sidetracked too often into scenes that take the plot nowhere and dissipate the suspense a thriller needs. Cronenberg had Sissy Spacek in mind for the role of Rose, but the producers disagreed, thinking that Chambers's notoriety as a porn actress wanting to go straight would attract audiences. Chambers gives a competent performance, but the role needs an actor who can generate both sympathy and menace -- the sort of thing Spacek demonstrated in Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976).

eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999)

Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh in eXistenZ

Cast: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, Ian Holm, Willem Dafoe, Don McKellar, Callum Keith Rennie, Christopher Eccleston, Sarah Polley, Robert A. Silverman, Oscar Hsu, Kris Lemche, Vik Sahay, Kirsten Johnson, James Kirchner. Screenplay: David Cronenberg. Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky. Production design: Carol Spier. Film editing: Ronald Sanders. Music: Howard Shore. 

It would be easy to ascribe the "body horror" of David Cronenberg's films to an adolescent desire to gross people out, but eXistenZ shows, more than perhaps any other of his movies, a deeper satiric intent. It establishes his kinship to authors like Swift and Kafka and D.H. Lawrence: a recognition of our alienation from the organic. I think the moment that shocked me most in the early part of the film came when I saw the console, the controller for the VR game that Allegra Gellar (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is demonstrating to her audience of potential players. Instead of a box of metal and plastic, it's a flesh-colored blob. It connects to the players not with headsets or helmets but with an UmbiCord, which is exactly what it sounds like: a fleshy rope that attaches to the player's spine, not with anything like a USB port but with an implanted orifice that's very like an anus. Throughout the film, we are confronted with the moist, the slimy, the irregular, from a gun that's flesh and bone and shoots teeth to a Chinese restaurant's "special" that makes the gorge rise. Cronenberg is intent on reminding us that though we are flesh and blood, we shy from the fact. When Ted Pikul (Jude Law) recoils from having a port implanted in his spine, he objects to the vulnerability of an opening directly into his body, whereupon Allegra simply opens her mouth and sticks out her tongue, reminding him that we already have physical openings to the world. On this premise, Cronenberg builds his intricate, recursive story, one that defies summary but carries a multitude of meanings. Yes, it's a satire on the videogame industry, and yes, it's a commentary on our notions of reality itself. It's often compared to The Matrix (Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski), which came out the same year, but I think it's a superior, more layered film.  

The Brood (David Cronenberg, 1979)

Cindy Hinds in The Brood

Cast: Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar, Art Hindle, Henry Beckman, Nuala Fitzgerald, Cindy Hinds, Susan Hogan, Gary McKeehan, Michael Magee, Robert A. Silverman, Joseph Shaw, Larry Solway, Reiner Schwarz. Screenplay: David Cronenberg. Cinematography: Mark Irwin. Art direction: Carol Spier. Film editing: Alan Collins. Music: Howard Shore. 

Creepy children have become a staple of horror movies ever since Patty McCormack terrorized everyone as Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed (Mervyn LeRoy, 1956). The key here is the depiction of evil lurking behind a façade of innocence. Actually, the creepy child in The Brood is not Candice Carveth (Cindy Hinds), an otherwise ordinary 5-year-old, except as a vehicle for bringing out the creepy childlike creatures that are the movie's menace. It's a good, bloody, somewhat queasy film that plays on all sorts of phobias, including our suspicions about psychiatrists, and our tolerance for bodily functions. It proved too much for some of its early critics, including Roger Ebert, who dismissed it as an exploitation film, "reprehensible trash," and a bore. It may be the first, and perhaps the second -- given that one person's trash is another person's genre classic -- but it's certainly not the last. David Cronenberg is an insidious filmmaker, who constantly plays on our nerves without resorting to cheap jump scares. He makes you back off at times: In the scene that made most people feel at least faintly nauseated, I found myself saying, "It's only corn syrup and food coloring." We may also debate whether the film is fair to the psychiatric profession and even if there's a touch of antifeminism, but that means he's left you with something to think about. To dismiss The Brood as exploitative is to overlook the satire with which it's laced. 

Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983)

James Woods and Debbie Harry in Videodrome

Cast: James Woods, Debbie Harry, Sonja Smits, Peter Dvorsky, Leslie Carlson, Jack Creley, Lynne Gorman, Julie Khaner, Reiner Schwarz, David Bolt, Rena King. Screenplay: David Cronenberg. Cinematography: Mark Irwin. Art direction: Carol Spear. Film editing: Ronald Sanders. Music: Howard Shore. 

The menacing technology in Videodrome -- cathode ray tube TV sets, video cassettes (Betamax!), broadcast television -- looks antique and even quaint 40 years later. We worry today about the internet, smart phones, social media. But the root fear remains the same: extreme self-absorption, alienation, anomie. In that respect, David Cronenberg's fable has dated not at all. Partly that's because as a specialist in "body horror," Cronenberg, with the significant help of makeup artist Rick Baker, is able to translate psychological, even spiritual concerns into physical ones. The grotesque invasions of the body in Videodrome are treated as invasions of the soul. If I have reservations about the movie, it's that it too quickly pins the blame on television instead of exploring the root causes of the hunger for violence and violent sex that the medium exploits. It's like deploring consumerism while ignoring capitalism's encouragement of it. But that's another film entirely, or rather a whole bunch of films. 

M. Butterfly (David Cronenberg, 1993)

 

Cast: Jeremy Irons, John Lone, Barbara Sukowa, Ian Richardson, Annabel Leventon, Shizuko Hoshi, Margaret Ma. Screenplay: David Henry Hwang, based on his play. Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky. Production design: Carol Spier. Film editing: Ronald Sanders. Music: Howard Shore. 

If M. Butterfly were made today, 30 years later, I have a feeling that it would be a very different film, more acute in its treatment of sexual identity and in its exploration of cultural disjunction. Though both elements are touched on in David Cronenberg’s film, they are subsumed in the more traditional movie preoccupations, love story and spy thriller. Cronenberg’s rather languid pacing doesn’t help bring out its subtexts, and I think Jeremy Irons is severely miscast as the deluded, obsessed diplomat. Irons is strongest at creating dryly ironic characters with a hint of menace, but he doesn’t quite get at Gallimard’s vulnerability and naïveté. John Lone, on the other hand, is remarkable in his transformation into Song Liling, so much so that when he appears with short hair and in suit and tie late in the film, it’s momentarily hard to realize he’s the same person. This is, I think, one of those films that were much better and more provocative as plays. 

Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988)

Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers

Cast: Jeremy Irons, Geneviève Bujold, Heidi von Palleske, Barbara Gordon, Shirley Douglas, Stephen Lack. Screenplay: David Cronenberg, Norman Snider, based on a  book by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland. Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky. Production design: Carol Spier. Film editing: Ronald Sanders. Music: Howard Shore. 

Jeremy Irons's performance as the twin gynecologists Beverly and Elliot Mantle is spectacular in its subtle differentiation between the two men. It's one of David Cronenberg's body-horror films, and is said to have given many viewers, especially women, nightmares. 

Shivers (David Cronenberg, 1975)

Cast: Paul Hampton, Joe Silver, Lynn Lowry, Allan Kolman, Susan Petrie, Barbara Steele, Ronald Mlodzik, Barry Baldaro, Camil Ducharme, Hanna Poznanska. Screenplay: David Cronenberg. Cinematography: Robert Saad. Art direction: Erla Gliserman. Film editing: Patrick Dodd. 

Shivers is a kind of zombie movie, except that the zombies aren't out for brains, they're out to get laid. And they aren't really dead, but just under the influence of a parasite that unleashes their libidos and eliminates their inhibitions. It takes place in a high-rise apartment building on an island near Montreal, where a doctor has been experimenting with parasitic organisms that could potentially eliminate the need for transplants: Instead of having, say, a kidney transplant, why not remove the diseased kidney and replace it with a parasite that, in exchange for a small amount of the patient's blood, would perform all the functions of a kidney? But the parasite he's working with has the unfortunate effect of producing the symptoms described above -- which is fine with the doctor, because he thinks human beings are too sexually repressed. It's a clever premise for a horror movie, and totally in keeping with writer-director David Cronenberg's exploration in his films of the unfettered id. Unfortunately, it was made a few years before its time, so Cronenberg has to be more discreet in his depiction of the orgies of the victims of the parasite than he might have been a few years later, and the budget for the film was obviously scanty. It's shot in a rather muddy but garish color, and the lighting is flat and harsh. There are a few familiar faces -- of the "where have I seen him/her before?" order -- among the actors, but mostly it's a cast of hard-working unknowns. One of Cronenberg's first features, it's a good sample of the better-made horrors yet to come.  

A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, 2011)

Viggo Mortensen in A Dangerous Method

Carl Jung: Michael Fassbender
Sigmund Freud: Viggo Mortensen
Sabina Spielrein: Keira Knightley
Otto Gross: Vincent Cassel
Emma Jung: Sarah Gadon

Director: David Cronenberg
Screenplay: Christopher Hampton
Adapted from a play by Christopher Hampton based on a book by John Kerr
Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky
Production design: James McAteer
Music: Howard Shore

Sometimes, as Freud said, a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes, as Viggo Mortensen, playing the man himself, demonstrates, a cigar is a prop that can help you win an acting contest. Because too often a costume drama based on a play becomes just that: a contest among actors to show who can come out on top, especially when the cast consists of actors like Mortensen, Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, and Vincent Cassel -- none of them exactly shy of showing what they can do before a camera. When I heard of it, I thought Mortensen was a decidedly off-beat choice to play the father of psychoanalysis, and he was in fact the second actor to be cast in the role, after Christoph Waltz, an almost inevitable choice, found he had a scheduling conflict. Mortensen had worked with director David Cronenberg twice before, but playing men of violent action in Eastern Promises (2007) and A History of Violence (2005), not a pre-World War I middle-European Jewish intellectual. And yet Mortensen gives a delicious performance as Freud: puckish, proud, intellectually combative. And the cigar helps, whether brandished elegantly or plugged defiantly in the middle of his face. By contrast, everyone else seems a little over the top. Fassbender (who was second choice after Christian Bale) is his usual handsome presence, but he frets a little too visibly and never quite establishes Jung as the challenger to Freud's authority that Freud seems to have thought him to be. Keira Knightley acts the electrons off the screen as Sabina, almost popping out an eye and dislocating her jaw in her mad scenes, but recovers nicely in her later moments in the film. And Vincent Cassel, as the mad Otto Gross, takes his role to the extreme as the man who carries Freud's theories about repression to their logical extreme: Don't repress anything. Ever. The film's battle of ideas gets a little bit lost in all the emoting, and as so often happens in filmed costume dramas, the scenery and the sets capture the eye when the words should be capturing the mind. But Howard Shore's evocation of the melancholy side of Wagner's music is perfect for the era in which the film is set, the transition from 19th-century Weltschmerz into 20th-century bloodshed, a time when, as Joyce punned, we were Jung and easily Freudened. Jung's prophetic dream of a bloody tide sweeping over Europe is cited in the film, as a warning that all of this intellectual (and sexual) ferment was about to be inundated by war.  

Watched on Starz Encore

Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, 2007)

The Russian mafia seems to have supplanted the Italian kind in the popular imagining of the violent criminal world. It has long been a staple of TV crime shows like Law & Order, but David Cronenberg gave it the most impressive and terrifying embodiment yet in Eastern Promises. The film, set in London, is a strikingly globalized production, with a Canadian director and English screenwriter (Steven Knight) and actors who are Danish-American (Viggo Mortensen), British (Naomi Watts), German (Armin Mueller-Stahl), French (Vincent Cassel), Polish (Jerzy Skolimowski), and Irish (Sinéad Cusack). Yet the film somehow maintains a strong semblance of authenticity, thanks to strong performances. Mortensen, long a favorite of mine, gives an intensely compelling, and Oscar-nominated, portrayal of a Russian undercover agent infiltrating the mob. His celebrated battle in the steam bath, in which he, naked and unarmed, is attacked by two well-clothed thugs carrying linoleum knives should never let you take another two-against-one battle in a James Bond film seriously. (Or not until Daniel Craig does it in the nude.) Mueller-Stahl demonstrates once again that one can smile and smile and be a villain, and Cassel steals scenes with his portrayal of Mueller-Stahl's careless, dissipated weakling of a son. My only complaint about Eastern Promises is a rather saccharine ending to Watts's portion of the story. The story of Mortensen's character ends inconclusively, with his apparent ascension to the role of boss of the mob, a risky position for an undercover agent. A sequel has been proposed and postponed, and at last report seems to be dead.