The return of David Cronenberg to his "body horror" milieu is a menagerie of his classic themes, the dual corporeal/carnal disgust/arousal (Shivers, Dead Ringers), the intersection of flesh and technology (The Fly, Videodrome), the taboo of the intoxication of trauma (Crash, Naked Lunch), body modification as a desperate form of mortal control (The Brood, eXistence), the opposite of pleasure is not pain but numbness (pretty much all of the above). "Surgery is the new Sex" has everything you'd want a new Cronenberg film to promise.
Does it work? In some ways better than others. The film flirts with some issues of environmentalism and evolution that are not fully fleshed out, and made more complicated by an almost completely incoherent government plot which isn't so much a spoiler than a tease. Unlike Videodrome, the self-consuming obscurity of these aspects of the plot don't have the symmetrical paranoia to justify keeping it obscure. It just feels half-sketched, tacked on, an excuse-of-a-vehicle on which to carry its other themes. And ultimately, the themes are more like familar Cronenberg touchstones than explorations, like a self-homage, without the resolution of his earlier, better work.
Where it succeeds is where you'd hope and expect, which is its graphic imagination. The film is dank and dark, the technology is classically garish and gothic. Howard Shore provides another evocative soundtrack. Viggo Mortensen looks like Darkman for some reason. And Lea Seydoux, an excellent Cronenberg muse, seems to be channeling the occult soul of Marjorie Cameron's Scarlet Woman, decadence and indulgence, invoking the refinement of flesh. Maybe the problem with the film is that it's ultimately too secular, not indulging enough in its mysterious and sinister spiritualism. But then, it probably wouldn't quite be a Cronenberg film, ever the clinical doctor he is.
7.5/10
Rock wrote:
