The Essentials: David Cronenberg’s Best Films

“Dead Ringers” (1988)
Inspired by the stranger-than-fiction (unless that fiction is Cronenberg’s) story of real-life twin gynaecologists, this disturbing film tempers the director’s long-running body horror fascination with some of the more psychological and philosophical conundrums of the human experience. Protagonists Elliot and Beverly Mantle (both played by Jeremy Irons), identical twins so close they are almost one person, share literally everything and take to impersonating each other as it suits them, which leads to decidedly unethical situations both in their medical practice and their personal lives. Though one is slightly more sensitive and recalcitrant than the other, they both, like many Cronenberg “heroes,” lack basic emotional intelligence, something which, coupled with their chosen field of gynecology, allows them to take hideous advantage of women at their most vulnerable. It’s not until a woman (Genevieve Bujold) comes between them (graphically symbolized in a vivid dream of said woman attempting to chew through the fleshy umbilical cord that binds the twins in their symbiotic existence) that things start to fall apart. Mostly taking a break from gross-out prosthetics and gore “Dead Ringers” was Cronenberg at his most visually restrained, served well by the aristocratic Irons, whose masterful double performance, enabled by motion control camerawork, allows the audience to tell the identical twins apart, most of the time, by mannerisms alone. And yet there are moments of completely visceral unease woven in (God those nightmarish gynaecological instruments) and amid the cold-to-the-touch photography resulting from the director’s first collaboration with future longtime cohort, cinematographer Peter Suchitzky, the jangling uncanniness of ‘Dead Ringers’ lingers long after the credits roll. [A-]

READ MORE: David Cronenberg Says Stanley Kubrick Didn’t Understand Horror And That ‘The Shining’ Is Not “A Great Film”

“Naked Lunch” (1991)
Unusually, for a filmmaker embarking on such an endeavor, Cronenberg himself more or less agreed with those who suggested that “Naked Lunch,” by William S Burroughs, a writer to whom Cronenberg had long felt a kinship, was “unfilmable.” Or rather, a direct interpretation “would cost $400 million to make and be banned in every country in the world.” Which is why his adaptation is not really an adaptation at all, it’s more a palimpsest, providing several parallel, occasionally overlapping narratives that weave together fictionalized events from Burroughs’ own life with the storylines from his most famous book. It ultimately, somewhat surprisingly, becomes a meditation on the creative process, albeit one with more talking typewriter bugs with assholes for mouths than most other such. Grotesque, demented and dark, “Naked Lunch” is also mordantly funny, mining a vein of hallucinatory satire exaggerated to the point of absurdity, and showing Cronenberg’s always present but often deep-buried sense of humor more overtly than most of his mid-period titles.  Protagonist Bill Lee (the Burroughs surrogate, played by Peter Weller) is an exterminator who gets high on bug powder, to which his wife (Judy Davis) is also addicted. Together Davis and Weller both deliver droll performances, until the notorious true-life William Tell scene is replayed and Bill is plunged into the oneiric world of the Interzone, and a series of disjointed, sci-fi-noir adventures ensue. Clark Nova, the aforementioned typewriter bug provides a kind of ongoing foul minded commentary addressing Lee’s latent homosexuality and the folly of creativity among other issues,and the collaboration between the late Ornette Coleman and Howard Shore yields an eccentric pulp score. Perhaps inevitably, the film fails to knit together into anything coherent, or any real kind of manifesto, but the scope of its ambition is staggering and the mastery of tone remarkable considering that tone is the trickiest part of this hubristic, caustic, altered-state extended delusion.  [B]

“M. Butterfly” (1993)
The straight-up period handsomeness of  “A Dangerous Method” seemed to zoom in out of leftfield for those glancingly acquainted with Cronenberg’s name and output, but we’d wager that’s because they simply forgot about, or had never seen “M. Butterfly,” to which it bears some similarities. In 1960s China, a French diplomat (played by Jeremy Irons) falls in love with an opera singer and the film unfolds essentially as a straightforward romantic drama. Considered within the Cronenberg canon, and as the follow-up to “Naked Lunch” it is perhaps one of the strangest films he’s ever made, because it’s so relatively “normal.” Of course, there are sexually transgressive overtones, that arise from a particular plot twist, but aside from that in theme and form, it’s largely unweird, and oddly for a Cronenberg film, also largely devoid of allegorical or satirical elements too. Perhaps because of this specificity, time hasn’t been kind to “M.Butterfly” which was also kind of reviled on release, with certain elements just not quite working out (John Lone’s opera singer is not hugely convincing pre-reveal) and the political subtext remaining stodgily undercooked. This a picture that’s oddly hard to take seriously, despite or perhaps because of the director’s evident desire to make a straight-up, strait-laced melodrama. While the picture attempts to convey a desperate passion that throws caution to the wind and disastrously defies social norms and good judgment alike (Irons’ character ultimately loses everything because of his indiscretions), it remains maybe the most curious failure of his career: a “tasteful” one.  [C-]

“Crash” (1996)
Was ever a novelist more perfectly paired with a director than JG Ballard with David Cronenberg? It’s hard to imagine anyone else could have approached the author’s demented 1973 story of car crash fetishism and creepy celebrity worship, and actually taken it further, turning it into a chilling portrayal of premillenial angst as manifested in an eroticized technophilia. But Cronenberg’s instinct for this material is innate, and he makes out of this ‘only from Ballard’ story an unmistakably Cronenberg film. Reviled and banned in some territories on release, with its graphic depictions of violence and sex, in particular the bit where… how to put this delicately… where James Spader fucks Rosanna Arquette‘s leg wound, “Crash” is certainly not for everyone (and we can’t but smile at the thought of some great-aunt renting the DVD when they wanted the trite Best Picture winner of the same name — it has to have happened, right?). But for fans of both Cronenberg and Ballard, and really anyone with an adult interest in what our ever-increasing obsession with technology might be doing to our relationships and to our psyches (to our souls, perhaps), it is vital, riveting filmmaking. Holly Hunter and Elias Koteas, especially, give great turns and Spader is perfect as another of Cronenberg’s cold, creepy protagonists (see Woods, Irons, Weller, and more latterly, Mortensen). But this is a film of ideas, some ugly, some profound, all disquieting, and the film pulsates with such perverse intelligence that those ideas don’t so much stay with you, as chase you out of the theater, across the parking lot… and into your car, which may or may not seem quite the same machine it was a couple of hours before. [A]