JG Ballard meets Ben Wheatley in Brandon Cronenberg’s latest. Which is a bit of a surprise, since the two have already met: in 2015, in the latter’s dystopian satire High-Rise.
There are (literal) shades of Nicolas Winding Refn, too, and a healthy smattering of body horror inherited from the old man, whose filmography Cronenberg Jr.
raids to make an unlikely fusion of Videodrome and A History of Violence, two very opposing milestones in his father’s career.
Unexpectedly, so much mixing and matching has resulted in the younger director’s most original and ambitious film so far; seeming to ditch the intellectually intriguing but dramatically sterile precision of his debut film Antiviral, Cronenberg is now going all-in for the cinema of nightmares, with a film that gets under the skin and itches, invades the brain and plays havoc with the synapses.
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