Movie.

Of course the film with themes of tarot (our main guy has on the fool's tunic after all. He loves playing with cups. There are literal tarot cards) is going to draw me in.

The complete lack of audio aside from dry, scientific narration makes for a fascinating experience. Just like how the subjects have had speech centers removed, our audio blindness also increases our psychic connection to the characters. We have to interpret the images, the connecting threads, the motivations, all within our minds. Whatever we think and feel is projected onto the actions of these characters.

Also incredible timing, right after I have watched Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and Psycho-Pass, here is another piece of media about what it means to exist as an individual and as a commune. The discussion of sexuality, eroticism, and gender. I feel like this is going to end up being a vital thesis statement for the rest of the Cronenberg movies on this list. I am so excited to see how these ideas grow and change through his filmography.

I never would have imagined I would so thoroughly enjoy a film with Zero Score AND Zero Foley. Literally just dry, flat narration. Crazy work.

Also, it feels like a bunch of film students were allowed to run around in the coolest looking building for 5 hours.

WOW

There are so many ways that a movie can be and this is one of them. There's gender, there's gay love, the movie is so tactile, it's so wet.

There's so much in the way these characters interact and it goes perfectly along with the Cronenberg project. "Everything is sexual, to breathe is sexual, even to die is sexual." These characters struggle with accepting themselves, accepting each other, accepting death, but they all eventually achieve some level of actualization in these regards. She puts herself onto the drill after their confrontation. Tetsuo takes on the "rust infection" by choice. The Fetishist takes the violence inflicted upon him in the past and inserts it into his own leg. There's just so much going on and you only have an HOUR with these people. It's crazy how much work gets done in that hour. Wild. Never seen anything like it before. I didn't know movies could be like this.

What if we lived in a world with no "women"?

What sorts of sexuality, sensuality, and eroticism would we develop?

There's a fascinating exploration 'mating rituals' that plays with the lack of diegetic audio, as the actions of characters play alongside frog or bird mating calls. The way Tripod (three feet, huh? in a movie about people growing new organs and using feet as a sort of mating ritual?) discreetly reveals the sole of his foot to the dancer in the hall, the subtle luring and cold shouldering we are familiar with in normal courtship.

There is a fascinating tension in Tripod's character where he keeps talking about his objective distance from the subjects of his study but he licks his glasses to taste what he sees. He complains of the way his interns physically interact with Rouge but he is the one milking Rouge's Foam straight from Antoine's nipples. So then of course he becomes a part of the subversives because he has observed them, he has become obsessed with them.

The institute of venereal disease research has a patient who grows strange organs that are surgically removed, who craves to keep these organs and refers to them as solar systems pulled from his galaxy. Careful to avoid making it sound like a mother separated from her child. The researcher caring for the little girl ("prepubescent research specimen" i think Tripod called her) has her ripped away from him and he stands holding her drawings, distraught, and clutches his stomach in a clear maternal display.

And isn't it interesting how there's a disease that kills women and Antoine Rouge, a man, succumbs to it? Fascinating film. Also, very fun to have Tripod use a Bipod to kill a man.

Also also, the dude who barges in and drags a dude into an alley and returns with a literal pearl necklace? and a mouthful of meat? okay then!

"Too much brain, not enough guts." That's the problem with man, he says.

It's interesting to watch this after Stereo, to go from the realm of purely mentalized sexuality into fully physicalized. It pulls on the same threads of omnisexuality and the tension of monogamy. However, in Shivers, the aphrodisiac and sexual contact are coerced rather than freely shared in basically every scenario. There's a lot of rape and incest and CSA in this film by the end.

I enjoyed how each individual encounter plays on a common fear. The married couple where the emotionally distant husband (who looks like if Adam Driver and Adrien Brody were the same dude) turns their dead bedroom into a sexual assault. The woman and her daughter in the elevator with a much larger man, and it turns into a sexual assault. The woman seeking emotional support from her friend who takes advantage of her vulnerability. The Straight Guy who sees two gayboys and thinks "oh god they for sure want kiss me" and runs away from his gay thoughts. I personally think Cronenberg was highlighting the way all these thoughts and fears start with "Sex" they start with a clenching in the gut that says "whatever is going on here is sexual." And this movie manifests the fears into reality. Also every encounter is a violation of trust. A father and daughter, the residents with the apartment staff, the husband and wife, a close friend and a close friend.

I think we had enough runtime to squeeze in more clone shenanigans.The camerawork is nauseating at times (which feels intentional. but it also feels nauseating). I'm glad Mia Goth got to vamp out and be a weird girl with a gun, unconvincing at times but fun nonetheless (funtheless).

It is starting to seem that the tradition Brandon is carrying forward from David is "using movies as an arena to explore your hypotheticals." That fascination with watching yourself die, the sort of romanticization of "brutal regimes," the feeling of letting go, going ape shitt. Fun ideas but i think this execution missed a bit for me.

This one was a bit harder for me to wrap my head around thematically compared to the previous three films. I do feel better about having Titane placed after this on the list though, what with a woman having an accident and surgery that has consequences leading her to a wild journey of death and violence.

There's this wonderful shot of some artwork and Mindy's apartment that's a bunch of barbs converging on the bottom corner of the frame and Mindy walks right into the shot and positions herself so her head is the target of all those barbs. It looks so cool and it is of course right before she gets stuck with the pitussy. They did a real good job of making that thing look like a butthole btw

PENDING SO LIKE I NEED TO COME BACK IN HERE AFTER REWATCHING IT. I DIDN'T SAY SHIT IN MY ORIGINAL REVIEW? IT WAS AT THE START OF MY MOVIE JOURNEY. TWO YEARS? Two Years and I already think my ass was stupid af?

I actually enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to.

The running theme of Crawl/Walk/Run/Fly was fun to see unfold. Especially when our antagonist tries to literally fly away in an airplane and gets obliterated by a car. This was after the announcers said the final race would really see these "Funny Cars Fly." The passing of the torch, allowing the kid to "run" the final race.

It's really funny that Black decided to hold his tongue until the actual race and just kind of hoped he could get out in front of Billy and fucking Explode. Also really funny how the end of the movie had three dudes burn to death badly. Particularly because it's mostly a chill movie. It's low stakes until it isn't.

Classic setup for a passing the torch film, the old guy reunites with an old lover and the young guy meets a young lover. The old love is invigorated by the energy of the young love, the young love learns some lessons from the old love.

I think there's also an interesting idea Billy has these two other girls but when he mentions falling in love three times, he's obviously referring to Candy as the third woman and in order to convey this, he literally takes the fastco oil and pours it on one of the girls so she is now a fastco girl. Also does a fun little tie in with lubricating and maintaining The body like a vehicle

It definitely doesn't have as intense a philosophy as the previous films BUT he is definitely getting a little hot under the collar about fast cars.

When Lonnie is taking action, the camera loves to be down low and looking up at him. He's the Legend and the camera treats him that way. Everyone looks up to Lonnie, even his rival. Especially his rival. It's a great touch

A little over halfway into the film, there is a shot that frames two books. One of them is A Concise History of Sculpture. From the back cover of that edition of A Concise History of Sculpture:

"A true work of art... acts as a bridge between the two worlds of feeling and perception."

This movie does that.

That's what this movie shows us in that opening performance art piece (that is actually a psychoplasmic therapy session). The artform takes the feeling and makes it perceivable. The hatred and love boil up into literal boils on the flesh. "I hate you because I love you." Being able to take those perceived words and convert them back into feeling. In the same way, the movie takes what we perceive and converts it into feeling within us. This movie played me like a fucking fiddle. David picked me up in his big hands and squished me around, I was putty to be molded by him. I feel like he did a psychoplasm on me. It's just a phenomenal film. I feel like I'll be able to sit down with this one for a long time examining all the structures between all these characters and how David was able to craft all of this together and make the presentation so.... perfect. I've already spent more time sifting through my screenshots from the films (where I encountered the books) and trying to get my thoughts organized in this review. My god. This is, dare I say, beautiful.

This is such an incredible synthesis of the overarching philosophy that he was building with the first 4 films. And it's so thoroughly heartbreaking. And it has given me two book recommendations.

What a great Double Feature to put with The Brood in my David Cronenberg project!! Thank you to a clever little froggie about it.

I love how the internal struggles of these characters manifest in the wild screaming tantrums, really conveying the intensity of these complex relationship frictions and making Sam Neill have the most sexual tension with the other men in the movie. He went crazy on that.

It makes me crazy when the Adjani looks directly into the eyes of the viewer. She has such powerful eyes and her expressions are so intense. If only I could be so magnificent when I am having a screaming, crying, and bleeding out mental breakdown.

Incredible exploration of the attachments we have to people and how hard it is to get a man to leave you alone.

This movie goes CRAZY if you have watched David's work up to this point. He brings back so many ideas, the psychic character with a self-inflicted trepanation. The concept of "rehabilitation through art," a group of subversives working to expand the limitation placed on humanity, the Attics as the Mind idea sort of comes back in. And he expands upon them with mixed results.

Also pretty sure one of David's favorite visuals is "buildings with glass facades and green lights in." It's in all these movies.

Anyway, yeah. Incredible visual effects, the artwork is beautiful. "My art is what keeps me sane" feels like the relationship David has with his movies. Similar to how the Psychic Gymnasium guy presents a test that is "Connecting your brain to his heart, all you have to do is make it beat faster." That's a great way to master the art of scanning, of implanting ideas and feelings. That's what David does in his movies to us the viewer. The excitement of the horror films connecting us to the characters so that the philosophy goes from our hearts up to our minds. Just like the concept in The Brood: "True art is the bridge between feeling and perception."

This came out nearly 20 years before Dr. Wakefield would publish the "vaccines cause Autism" study so Ephemerol creating social outcasts in vitro who struggle to connect to other humans socially was cutting edge. I do wish autism in real life gave you head blow up powers though....

I like the rejection of Bloodline Destiny in favor of Found Family, of solidarity with fellow scanners instead of animosity and violence and control. Also bringing us right into the conception of computer systems as living, thinking entities. Exploring the circuit boards the same way we got to explore the giant plaster head.

Also also pretty cool to have Vale sort of become a plaster art piece at the very end.

I promise I will come back here and edit this review into a fucking essay, I just have to like. I don't know. Decompress and process? Crazy work. God, watching Cronenberg's filmography up to this point makes this such a fucking experience. I think I have said this for the past like three films but this is a coalescence and a crystallization of the philosophy he's been exploring up to the point. It took me 150 minutes to watch this 90 minute film and I took about 600 screenshots. My neural floodgates were fucking OPEN. David put a videotape into MY stomach and played me.

"A true work of art... acts as a bridge between the two worlds of feeling and perception" from Herbert Read vs "Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience to those who watch it." from Brian O'Blivion

There's so much to discuss in regards to this field that I don't really know how to start So this is just going to be like one really long rambling garble of nonsense, okay? Are you okay with that? Is this a safe space?

for starters, There are a lot of people putting things into their mouths or between their lips in this movie. There is a level of intention behind it which obviously ties into the way we consume media but also the physicality of biting and kissing and tasting. This also ties into the stussy.

The way the dialogue is written drives me crazy. So much of it is just straight up directed at the viewer for our education on the subject David wants to explore while also still maintaining the narrative flow. The way audio mixing was used in this movie four lines of dialogue also made me crazy. Bridey arrived at his apartment and speaks with strange sort of echo which you could ascribe to her being in the hallway but she is directly repeating the lines that started the movie when she was just on a videotape and had that exact same sound mix. once she crossed the threshold into his apartment, her voice went back to a natural audio mix, it hard cuts to one. They do this several times throughout the movie especially with O'blivion.

The film perfectly captures the feelings that I've been experiencing watching through Cronenberg's work regarding engaging with media philosophically and really feeling like an artist has communicated directly to you. That There are ideas present in every work of art and if you do not look for them and understand them, It has control over you. A company that makes cheap glasses for impoverished nations but also develops missile guidance systems that are used to keep those nations down also uses their technology to root out all of the subversives in society and kill them. that media can implant messages within you that you then play back for others. because that's what keeps happening to Max isn't it, people give him messages and he spreads them.

There's something really beautiful in the scene where spectacular optics is recording Max's hallucination. And it's that David Cronenberg was the one wearing that big VR helmet. It wasn't James woods at that moment. David Cronenberg records his hallucinations and broadcasts them to us.

The bridge between feeling and perception. He literally has Brian Oblivion say that shit (in his own words anyway).

I caught a little bit of it in the brood but he really likes playing with the shadows cast by the character. The way his shadow frames certain things and reaches through windows. With the amount of time he has spent showing us images of Freud and Jung and such things, the idea of your shadow reaching through a screen goes hard. quite literally media being able to dig into your psyche directly. I think one of his later movies literally has Freud and Jung in it? I'm very excited to get to that one now.

The discussion of how televisions have become an extension of the physical body One goes back to scanners and how vale connected to a computer system which is just like a human nervous system and Two reaches forward to the way we conceptualize cell phones in the internet today, that our minds have integrated this technology into the way that we think and interface with the world. The unity of man and machine, something that's present even in fast company

Also there are eyes all over this fucking movie. I know it's obvious. But it's still there. We had scanners talk about the eyes actually being doors that allow people in and we have people speaking in this fucking movie and projecting themselves into someone's eyes and that causes the person's worldview to change. It allows the personalities to intermingle and for oblivion to actually spread his message coherently even though he's been dead for so long. One thing I love about Cronenberg is how he will always incorporate paintings and other artwork into the sets that are intended to be examined in conjunction with the movie.

When I first watched videodrome like two years ago, I thought "Wow, it's like a sort of inversion of The Matrix" and now I understand: it's the same philosophy, nothing is inverted.

particularly fun to line up the narrative beats of the story, of a straight white man having a woman introduce him to a new world, finding a wise man to explain to him the nature of reality, a wise man with a fully devoted and fully believing woman carrying his belief forward. The concept of needing belief or -- in terms of videodrome, a philosophy -- in order to navigate this world of facades. humans living as programmed beings. programmed by what the world presents to us. You even have the betrayal by the tech guy. someone who was in the hands of the system the whole time.

on its own, something that I really like about the matrix is how the movie is mirrored. obviously there's a lot of reflection imagery in the film but every scene and every action seems to have a counterpart. Trinity stepping into the phone booth and putting her hand against a glass, neo taking moves that he's seen from the agents and using them himself and I'm not just talking about the bullet dodging. Cypher wanting desperately to go back into the matrix while agent Smith is desperate to get out.

There's the repeating of lines, I mean the amount of déjà vu in this movie is absolutely crazy. each individual character gets a chance to discuss their own philosophy on the world, like mouse including sexual impulse in the base needs of humans. dozer breaking nutrients down to pure biological necessity and that being how he stomachs it.

It's just a very well thought out film experience, what else can I say.

There's a lot to like, I mean the framed photo of Ronald Reagan behind Stillson in a movie that ends with an attempted assassination from a story that was written two years before Mark David Chapman's attempt. Obviously, the movie came out afterward so it serves as a nice little visual tie-in.

I can appreciate that ole Steve was working through his feelings about political assassinations and giving us a story that follows a clear line of justification for someone who would be branded as a stochastic murderer whose friends and family would simply not understand why he did it.

I like the way the concepts of the "Importance of Human Touch" and "Lost Time" are explored in here. The first handshake Johnny has with Stillson being blocked by a campaign pin really was a good moment. I'm also never going to say no to a Motivated Presidential* Assassination Story. About how politics will move ahead without you if you don't get involved. How your ex will become a republican.

Unfortunately, it strikes me like a lot of King stories do: I really love the style and the setup... in the first half. A lot of the work Cronenberg has going on with odd lighting and shot comp pulled me in to the eerie uncanny world of these characters and their complicated feelings toward each other and the world around them but the farther along the movie goes, the weaker those elements become. It's certainly worth watching, just didn't really hit for me.

This all could have been avoided if he simply Registered To Vote.

God

DAMN

How does your past manifest in your present? What if your parents put a gun inside you, a gun that you carried for decades, loaded, ready to fire at any time if you were scared enough, angry enough?

I love the way this movie shows "reaching for violence as an answer," the way masculinity is expressed and the dangers of it. The struggle to differentiate between protecting your family and becoming a weapon, a killer. The hordes of big beefy boys slappin meat.

The direct connection between his son being kidnapped and his own dreams of his past family manifesting soon after has such a beautiful payoff. The way every action leads directly to the endangering of his own family every time. But he has to process this shit so he can manage it, right? The love he shares with his wife is so beautiful and their ability to overcome the grief and loss and tragedy, to Hashtag Become Anew, to move forward together past all of this horror. #relationshipgoals? I would say so.

The effects in this movie look so fucking cool, the color is so fucking good, imagery is so fucking rich. Tetsuo II is, in a term, So Fucking.

Good lord, now I feel traumatized and I ain't even involved with these people.

Watching all of these moments from the past manifest physically on this island, watching as Alma tries to support her husband through all of this and become injured herself, succumbing to ghosts that aren't hers. This movie goes crazy.

It has some of the most incredible black and white shots I have seen since beginning my movie journey these past three years. "A minute is actually an immense space of time." is CRAZY. The movie is 88 minutes long and like 5 of those minutes are spent completely motionless, with no dialogue. And I could still barely keep up. I felt like I was running after Johan just like Alma was. Trying to understand what these "cannibals" meant to him.

There's so much tragedy in this movie. The scared little boy in the closet, seeking absolution from his mother, taking beatings from his father. Finding himself unworthy of it. The scandalized artist who doesn't even want to call himself one. The Magic Flute, or finding intense beauty in the pits of despair that then manifests within the artwork. The woman who wants to love her husband but doesn't know how, who discovers that his past is harrowing, who thinks she can pull these ghosts into the light to dispel them and feeling guilty, that maybe she hastened his demise.

The final sentence trailing away with no ending had me screaming.

And don't think I don't see the Treachery of these Images, Berg. This real life film that is a movie enactment of the diary of a fictional artist and the verbal account of his wife and that enactment itself is a representation of figures from the artist's past AND there's a little puppet show but the puppet is a real man on a stage like yeah. This shit ain't a pipe. This movie goes crazy.

And it's some of the most beautiful and gripping black and white footage I have ever seen. It's such a gorgeous film. It's so hard to look away from it. The way they played with the shadows, my god the shadows in this movie is are so strong. Who else is doing it like this, truly?

You know, it really did get me in that final scene. The incredible shots of his body falling apart to reveal the final stages of Brundlefly as he drags Ronnie backwards to the telepod. The final fusion, combining man, machine, and insect. Truly becoming one with the project he already dedicated his life to. One that he was willing to risk his life for. And Ronnie still recognizing the man, unable to pull the trigger until Seth grabbed the barrel and basically consented, begged to be put down. The layers of emotions built into that scene created such a powerful payoff.

Geena Davis really knocked it out of the park. I mean so did Jeff Goldblum but every scene where she was sobbing and screaming was just so good. Veronica has to be in the list of Top Women Having the Worst Week of Their Lives.

The journey of anxiety->euphoria->frustration->dysphoria->acceptance->"bargaining" from Brundle through this whole transformation made for a true tragedy. I also really love how early in the movie he gets zapped and how looooong the process really was. It made that final lurch forward so much more the gruesome. To advance so far so quickly.

And, of course, we have a classic Cronenberg Concept with the Flesh making one Crazy. So crazy that all these men can't seem to care about consent. That is part of what made the Insect Politics line so good. Insects to ask, they don't compromise, they don't mess with all that stuff. They take what they need and he just learned that he needed a pure human to fuse with. So he had to run her off. But of course learning there's a baby changed the equations. An infinitesimally small organism threw everything into disarray. Just like with the fly. Her feelings about abortion also came into play in that final shotgun shot. A new lifeform was coming into the world and she had to abort it.

And this physicalizes the sensations a woman has when she slowly starts to realize her new boyfriend is a literally different kind of beast from her last ex.

Loooove how this expands on Cronenberg's previous explorations of Nervous Systems, particularly as in Scanners. Not to beat the already pulverized horse of "bridge between Feeling and Perception" but yeah. We see these clowns witnessing and then feeling shit through this whole movie and then feeling shit that manifests as perceptions for each other.

The amount of scenes where someone is playing proxy for someone else is wild, it's constant, like nearly every single scene. From Claire speaking through her secretary to Cary touching Bev in lieu of Elly, god especially the scene with Cary dancing with Bev (you know, I have tumblr mutuals who would be super into that).

The various forms of separation in the film all being capped off by "Separation can be a terrifying thing" at the end. Separation from Claire for ten weeks is scary, separation of Elly from the private practice is scary, separation from the stupendous amount of drugs is scary, etc. Every plotline is a different 'meta' study of the main themes; physical separation, psychic separation, relationship separation.

David Cronenberg movies will have you thinking shit like "the stomach really is the pussy of the soul" which is crazy and not normal but he still got me thinkin it.

Also, chalk yet one more film up in the recent watches where characters are acting while the actors portraying those characters are acting and the sub-acting is relaying the themes of the main-acting. Oh man, the way they were also playacting at the end as Cheng and Eng. You always love to see it. Also another film in the David Diary that really wants to talk about eating as it relates to consuming and the experience of consuming. "If it doesn't go in your mouth, it won't be in your blood," for instance. The split cake with no ice cream, the inability to eat in Bev. The discussion at the Very Start about how they can't experience something unless they BOTH experience it. So much juicy good stuff in here. Also those tools.... yowza.

I'll probably come back to this and increase my rating on it someday. I have basically no familiarity with William Burroughs So the elements that are biographical completely miss me however I can imagine some of them just based on this movie.

I really like the way they portray relationships with typewriters in this, a lot of craftspeople are like this with their tools in regards to being very particular about the ones they use, ascribing character traits to them, having the tools be part of their muse for the craft. I also like the discussion of whether someone is writing a story or whether a story is writing them. It plays in that familiar Cronenberg space I was so fond of in videodrome and the brood in particular: that what we are seeing on screen is a representation of ideas, that these characters are concepts in the script moreso than people. particularly with the way people in this movie are described as agents and how their actions were proscribed.

There's an abstract connection to location in this film, like seeing the New York alleyway through the window when we are supposedly in.... Actually I don't know where we are in the interzone. There are a lot of things that I don't know in this movie.

There's a return of a lot of my favorite Cronenberg philosophy in this movie as well. reaching all the way back to stereo with drugs and how they interface with our psychic connections to each other and the intimacy and sexuality of those connections (This film has a stronger connection to the way dead ringers use drugs but all three of these films have them in a similar space). The concept of omnisexuality and drugs breaking down those barriers that make us deviantly hetero or homo. It makes it interesting to place those ideas next to "the creative process" and all of these wet puppets the characters were fisting in this movie.

Also a return of one of my favorite of Cronenberg's concepts about bridging the worlds of feeling and perception in literally the first conversation he has with his boys at the diner. Like they are literally just talking shop on those philosophies

I feel like this movie, more than a lot of the previous entries, really lets you just hang out with these weird wet puppets. It's almost like not being in the horror category lets you just sit with the weird shit for longer. I love Clark Nova as a critter on screen but also I hate him for what he did to that poor woman.

Also this probably was not the intent but this movie does serve as a great response to anyone who has ever said "He must have been on drugs when he wrote this!" about previous films

The thing about it is I was on edge the entire movie really hoping that all of these little bits that built up over the runnime would be able to stick the landing in the final act.

A lot of them do and a handful don't quite. The story is so focused on these two characters that the political realities are flattened and it reminds you of the line early in the film: "It's about the music." You watch a man stumble through his orientalist racism and try to engage with the culture he is monitoring but my god he really does say some wild shit to Song and his lack of real education about the history of the land is what allowed him to be fooled by all the traditions Song teaches him.

Song is a real beauty in this film and Cronenberg knows how to show her off. The visuals are so rich, the lighting so controlled, and the colors are so inviting. The whole "it's about the music" bit really keeps hitting, too. As Rene tries to engage with the people around him, you get moments where random citizens of China are humming along with the non-diagetic music. It's what guides Rene through the streets. Many scenes establish the sonic identity of people and crowds and factions, there's a scene that's completely devoid of music and you really feel Rene's disconnect from the french embassy ideology in that.

I'm biased, of course. I never felt at any moment that Song was anything other than a woman. I think the prison van scene really cements that. The discussion, the feelings, the physical reality and the realm of the imagined, all of the asymmetries in their relationship and the constant pulling and pushing and yearning, the moments of solitude where we can see the characters free from influence. It feels bad to have this Chinese woman become infatuated with the very shallow racism of this man, it feels bad the way he chooses to describe her betrayal. But it's undeniably a romance that I felt physically through the movie.

I don't think any movie has made me feel this uncomfortable ever in my life.

I love all of the repeated visual motifs (Lingering on her Left Profile, the slow pan across someone then their eyes snapping open). Just the contrast in her scenes of overstimulation with the rapid cuts and odd angles and then the agonizingly drawn out scenes of.... let's call it mortifying the flesh, to put it nicely.

The scenes of Esther being overstimulated and anxious and the cuts are coming in fast and at odd angles. Then you have these scenes of slow, methodical digging into her own flesh and she's *reveling* in it.

The missed connection with Sandrine and also the other woman at the client dinner. Boyfriend constantly touching her in ways she can't feel. Just so much. I want to watch this again and watch for more of these little devices.

Rewatched for this project: 2026.01.29

I was going through somethin' when I watched this the first time. It was... much harder the second time. I had to take a weenie baby loser break, even.

But I also felt the story much more this time around. All of the social and romantic pressures twisting and contorting her to fit what they need, all of that internal strife has to manifest on the body, she has to Get It Out. She cannot find the words so it comes out in this other form of communication. It scares the people closest to her and that makes her even less able to speak it. The silent communication between characters is so much more understandable than the words they say, often entire scenes of dialogue get tangled in business PR talk and no one says what they mean. It leads to moments of understanding like with Sandrine denying Esther aid at the pool in a moment of jealousy after a perceived betrayal. Because Sandy got Esther this job in the first place and she accelerated beyond her. Or the moment Esther wakes up with a numb arm and Vincent rubs the feeling back in. That pulled her back in to him more than any of his verbal concern. He was taking physical action that showed care rather than pressing and pressing and pressing her.

The way the world is afraid of someone who is clearly in need, the way women have to hold their tongues in order to advance in the world, in order to fit into the boxes people expect of them. In order to explore herself, she has to be in a quiet place, "no AC, hot, hard to breathe" and the connection to construction sites, supply sheds, and hardware/utility tools, it's as if her body is An Object in the same way. A tool to be used, by her job, her boyfriend, her friends. She feels so disconnected from her physical self and this is a way to reconnect to it. The tanned skin pressed against her breast and kissed like a baby being fed, in a way, cared for.

The disconnected arm at the dinner is such a good visual. In terms of the quote I've been tracking since I started the Cronenberg Project (in my letterboxd lists) this film does "serve as a bridge between perception and feeling." Every social encounter (perception) is followed by some form of physical self harm (feeling) and all of Esther's feelings (stress, rejection, pressure) are converting into perception (visible wounds, flowing blood).

I also really like how a lot of the score feels like two songs overlaid onto each other and we have these visual elements that are split in two. Stereo audio and stereo visual. Big fan of, also, the medical personnel being very professional and forthcoming. They communicate clearly and Esther seems more at ease around them as a result. They work off what they perceive and say as much. She gets tanning advice for human skin from a pharmacist who really just doesn't seem to mind at all. They treat her body with a sense of objectivity (ha!) instead of ownership or entitlement.

I need to go back and add a tag for films that made me audibly say "I didn't know movies could be like this." I guess that's kind of what I've been giving five stars to. David has done that to me several times on my little Cronenberg Codex project.

The sound design: absolutely incredible

The costuming: absolutely incredible

The score: absolutely incredible

The editing (holy shit the editing?): absolutely incredible

The colors and shot comp and stunt driving (shout out to stunt driver John Cocks in the credits) and lighting and locations... This is a Capital M Movie, you know what I mean?

I'm going to skip over all that shit And also skip over the themes and the bodywork and the sex in this review because I want to highlight something else:

let's talk about metanarrative layers.

The crashes that we see on screen are performed by stunt drivers. There's an actor who plays the role of a stunt driver but the driving was done by a real life stunt driver and not the actor. We have an author named James Ballard who wrote a book where the main character is named James Ballard and he's making a movie. And now in the movie adaptation of this novel, James Ballard is making a movie. We are seeing a movie adapted from a novel about a movie guy making a movie whose name is the same as the author. Goes crazy!

To think about it further, you have a novel where Vaughan stages non-fatal crashes that are recreations of real life fatal crashes. David Cronenberg adapted this into a movie which means he had to stage non-fatal crashes that are recreations of fictional non-fatal crashes that are themselves recreations of Real Life Fatal Crashes. Cronenberg took the concept that Vaughan was developing in the novel and made it real. He literally, physically embodied the fiction of the novel and put it to film and showed it to us. And it's still fiction! But simultaneously real! These characters are putting their lives on the line and experiencing that rush as they dance with death the same way the stunt drivers in real life had to do for this film and literally every other film involving filmed car crashes. That's meat I could (and will) chew on for days. Because after the character Vaughan dies, Ballard embodies him. He fulfills the dream, the project. Take a Crash Car and fix it up just enough to roll and do a crash in it. Ballard allows Vaughan's vision to live through his body. Cronenberg allowed Ballard's vision to live through his movie, his actors and stunt drivers. The work in making this movie carry the themes of the novel, the way Cronenberg carries the themes of Ballard, the way all of these layers meld and mingle and somehow, despite the layers being so densely stacked, the separation of the artist and the viewer is made THINNER. We are being spoken to directly.

A big incredible scene in this movie is one where the characters are walking around the scene of an accident that is under active processing by emergency services but the tone is basically indistinguishable from a film set. I just fucking love this shit. There's this crazy moment where we get to see wild car sex that basically hard cuts to James Ballard on his movie set watching his own production unfold, like he was staging his production as David Cronenberg was also staging the Crash production. Like, David, I feel like you're talking directly to me. And that's just like one aspect of the movie that I'm talking about right now. There are so many facets to this film and I didn't even do a good job adequately expressing one of them. Movies. wow!

That ruled. The scene where he slips into an accent when he gets startled, I did not anticipate the payoff to that. I genuinely yelped in that final sequence when he spoke. That was so much fun! This goes absolutely crazy if you play TTRPGs. Also a great moment when it clicked that all the reptile imagery was a discussion of the "reptile brain." The lines about "doing what feels like your character wants to" which is letting the lizard brain steer the ship.

I was about 15 minutes into the movie when I started saying "wow, the framing of these shots and the editing is very careful and considered in spite of the clumsy dialogue and stiff acting." And then the really heavy-handed anal sex allegory kicked in and I was like "Oh This is very funny" And I started really enjoying the thematic aspect of it. That feeling of using games and roleplay to explore new sensations (foreign cuisine scene) or scary stuff (the violence and relived fear from an assault) and the feeling of getting so lost that you lose that separation of game and real life and you are just actually scaring yourself (when the game pod gets blasted with an smg). Just a really thorough exploration of why we tell stories and how we go about doing it

That's why the first 45 minutes of the movie are a warm up to feeling safe about having anal sex.

What an absolute visual delight.all of the x's and crosses scattered about, the monochroma, the screens that filter out colors, the curtains ("the curtains are brown" oh you think you're funny, Brandon?), the vibrations, the incredible wax melting shots. I thought it was cute how we see a bull being diverted from the (red? in black and white) cape by a radio signal. A documentary about animal brain control.

I love a story about your job instrumentalizing you to the point of dehumanization. Market research, assassination, the way both of these people are pulled away from their reality by their jobs. I love a story about how we don't understand our loved ones as much as we think we do. How easily we can be fooled by the surface. A story about how our desires and our actions can be so misaligned that we lose sight of ourselves.

Particularly enjoyed how he plays with the concept of synchronization and how many shots, including the very first job Tasya runs in the film, have some vibrating thing that is suspended only through resonance or how shadows will be split into threes and fours as these characters are less and less in tune with each other.

This is my first Brandon Cronenburg film on The Great 2026 Cronenberg Expedition (check my lists) and I'll definitely be moving its position once I watch some more David and find a good pairing. I had no idea what to expect coming into this one but I was surprised at the philosophy and humanity present in the script. It's a very tender movie in spite of it all, I guess that's the Cronenberg Family Brand. Looking forward to what else he has to show me!

It's interesting to see this directly after eXistenZ. Both films are interested in talking about how we build stories with eXistenZ being a collaborative one while Spider is completely solo. We watch Spider collect bits of junk and connect them like puzzle pieces, weave a story (a web) that keeps him trapped in the past. We the viewers are shown all the puzzle pieces and we watch the various ways they fit together as a complete picture by the end.

I do like the idea in here of "When your conception of someone changes, it feels like they died," it's like your perspective changes and yoru image of someone shatters. That said, I struggled to hook into this movie. i suppose that's part of the puzzle process though, isn't it? It doesn't look like much until you start to make a few connections.

This movie romance is a lot more convincing than many because it shows something we miss in a lot of others: the characters actively choosing each other. Tom is choosing actively live the way that he does so that he can be with his wife and kids. Edie actively chooses to be Tom's wife after all of this shit starts shaking. You see them work together and separately to maintain these ideals. You feel like they love each other.

a lot of fun work with the themes in this one, the disposability of names, the active choice that is violence, the masks that we wear and how we come to wear them. It really feels like all of the violence that happens in the movie is well foreshadowed, the two sex scenes work very well with these themes.

and the film ends with one of my favorite thematic notes which is the innocence and naivete of a child are able to properly navigate these complexities because they are not yet blinded by the boxes and labels of society. Something that was briefly discussed with his son earlier about what to call him. The answer is Dad because it doesn't matter if he's Tom or Joey, he's Dad.

Another big win for Morgan fans, she said "Hey, I know the perfect follower for History of Violence." and threw on my boy Tsukamoto.

I don't know, man. He just knows how to make movies. He is a genius, I think. Every time I watch one of his Sub-90min Slammers, I am left repeating the question "how the fuck was that 70 minutes? how did he fit so much in 70 minutes?" And the answer is that he builds up his symbols and themes and fucking USES them.

In this movie, every single interaction happens in the shadow of violence. You can feel the weight and tension as a truly tangible force. Every decision made in the movie is in this light, every action taken. We spend about 10 minutes of the runtime just watching people stand still and stare at the camera and like. It works so fucking well. Even when nothing is Happening, the movie is still Talking to you. The sound design is incredible, the sounds these swords make as they wait anxiously to be swung, the whispering that dominates half the dialogue, the strained screams and the full throated ones. The score is incredible and the long stretches of silence are incredible. The lighting and how cutting a man down immediately puts the movie into nightfall.

Much like History of Violence, we have a man who is trying to avoid reaching for violence and reckoning with the fact that the violence in the past will never leave him alone. Well. Killing by Shinya Tsukamoto. Take the same circumstances (to a degree) but set it in Edo Period Japan. Replace the guns with swords. It has a VERY different discussion on the subject but they are definitely playing in the same space. What name do you go by? What does Samurai mean as an identity vs what does it mean to actually be one. What does it mean to kill and is it ever justified? When violence manifests, is it cool and clean or is it scary and hard to follow? What does it mean when violence is consensual? What are the connections between Violence and Sex? We spent like 100 minutes watching this movie because we were pausing it to really dig into the meat of these questions in every scene. Tsukamoto really does infuse his ideas into every single moment of the film. Absolutely one of my Directors of All Time.

This was a real treat of a film. The sets and locations look fantastic and the cuisine and culture on display are dazzling. All the ways people talk past each other and try to catch each other at odd angles is also very fun.

Something i particularly liked is how the people offering kindness in the beginning were leveraging it to keep Anna involved. She ever tries to deny them multiple times but the insistence overwhelms her. It ties in with the way little bits and pieces are sprinkled through the film that hint at certain developments. Loyalties, motivations, identities. It's very good.

This is yet another Cronen Film that is interested in the roles a character adopts and their mindset within those roles. Going the distance to get the tattoos, the titles of prince/king/driver/papa/[name]. There's also plenty of space to read into a certain pair of boys having romantic chemistry.

It really is fascinating watching the way all of these characters, almost all from very different but geographically proximal locations, bounce off of each other with their cultures, superstitions, rituals, languages. These relationships all feel very rich and thoroughly developed and immersive. It's just a good movie, folks.

This falls firmly between Tetsuo 2 and Snake of June, you could even put Toshiaki Toyoda's Pornostar on the outside of this venn diagram.

It's a fun exploration of violence and the kinds that are consensual and non-, like tattoos and piercings vs the past rebar slaying piercing or non-con scarring. What it means to subject yourself to the possibility of permanent change through that violence, what it means to put your body on the line. Of course I was going to love this one. These characters are all moving through roles, even replaying moments to do the role better, in order to improve themselves and to change their relationships and to affect their dynamics. Lover, cuckold, rival, former friend, object of affection, prize. I watched this after History of Violence in my Cronenberg project (see my lists) and it fits extrEMELY well, the way these characters navigate masks and roles and romance.

I always enjoy it when David pulls a demonstration: "I'm going to sit behind you. Try not to look back at me." After that point, the movie makes a point of having a statue of a philosopher, a painting of Freud, a different character, and such things behind these characters as they are analyzing each other. There are all kinds of subtle little motions like when Sabina makes the first sexual admission in therapy, Jung's fingers start stroking his pen. The interplay of id, ego, super-ego plays out between these three orbiting figures (plus the bonus Otto Gross) and we get to watch as every flare up of desire runs through layers of repression, submission, resistance and acceptance.

If you are a thorough Cronenberg Fan, you will be reminded of Stereo, CotF-1, and The Brood, particularly. I was very excited to get to a film about Jung and Freud since all of David's work features explorations of their ideas, running them through the wringer to see what juice comes out. You get masks, shadows, projection, repression, pulling on the mysticism of Jung that we also saw in Stereo, pulling on the psychoanalytical bend of The Brood and mirroring a lot of the set dressing and Jungian analysis. We get the hints of omnisexuality as the tension builds between the two men. Reminders that Freud always reaches for the sexual explanation takes us aallll the way back to the monologue in Shivers about A DREAM where AN OLD MAN says EVERYTHING IS SEXUAL. Crazy.

It's great how Cronenberg uses Viggo Mortensen. He's always making him suck on things and smoulder sensually and pierce men sexually with his gaze. I enjoyed the work that came out of Keira Knightley here. Unfortunately, Michael Fassbender is missing something. James Spader, Jeremy Irons, Ronald Mlodzik... they are all spindly brunette twinks who are weirdo freakies on camera. Fassbender doesn't have that energy. I think maybe David wasn't sure what to do with him.

I haven't even really started talking about the movie yet, jesus. It is getting harder and harder to stay concise. I think it's crazy how this movie ended with me feeling more sour on Jung than Freud. Movie does a great job making you grimace at Carl as he sort of bumbles through these engagements. I really like how the tension between the two men was barely subtextually romantic. I REALLY like how Sabina's feelings manifest as perceptions (cronen-codex fans know) on her skin. When she experiences humiliation, she breaks out into sweats, her body wracks, she gets wet. She has dreams where her desires are felt like a slimy appendage staking up her back. I think Knightley managed to make me feel the same sensations as she writhed and described. I've really been enjoying how David has been exploring the subject of shame in the past few flicks.

Oh. And I can't forget my absolute favorite part of the entire experience:

Fassbender is looking blankly into the distance and the movie fades to black.... White text fades in.... OTTO GLASS DIED BADLY OF STARVATION. I was cackling

This Tsukamoto guy is really good at making an ending that will get you sobbing. Or at least get a little misty. I've seen Tetsuo 1&2, Vital, and this. It really feels like the movies are built to teach you a visual language and then deliver a beautiful statement in that language. He's able to make these movies so short and snappy because he encodes so much meaning into these symbols (in this case: photo albums, cameras, umbrellas, water, apertures) that he can cram 120 minutes of movie into 75 minutes of real time. It's crazy.

The visuals of this film are so crazy, the monochrome looks so good and there are just so many truly beautiful frames. The camera really makes the world look scary and dark when she is "wearing her shame" in public. The skylight being finally bathed in light after the whole movie being a source of darkness. He is also one of the few directors I trust with the shaky cam. Very well deployed in the times it reflects the characters' emotional state. This film does one of my favorite movies tropes which is " movie about photography weirdos." The camera with the big flash to "make 'em cum," the more intimate portrait camera for fully developed and rendered photos, and the homemade camera from his childhood for the final view of himself. Crazy work, beautiful.

It's such a tender and empathetic exploration of shame and the blocks that get in the way of our love when we treat is AS shame. This dude is making some of my favorite love stories I've seen in movies.

Have you ever tried to pick up something really heavy that doesn't have handholds? How you can feel it slipping from your grip and nometimes it just completely escapes and slams back onto the ground? How you can sometimes feel like you have a good hold but it starts to slide free anyway? That's how I felt trying to parse the dialogue in this film. I got some good ideas out of it but i know I dropped the line several times.

He explores some of my favorite themes here like "What's the point of HAVING something if you don't USE it?" Particularly, Eric has a line that i really like about it: Try holding a piece of gum in your mouth without chewing it. It also manifests in how he has a military aircraft that he flew once but it has been unused since. He goes to look at it sometimes. Or his security dude's gun. Or penises, prostates. You gotta stim your 'state or else it'll get asymmetrical (also incredible that we got like a 5 minute long ncene od him getting fingerblasted by a doctor.)

The Theory lady was maybe my favorite conversation because I was just yesterday writing an essay about the way we experience and express the future. I came to the conclusion that anxiety and hope are future feelings that we pull back to us. So Eric is talking about how the market runs on the idea of a future but That Future never comes or it's wrong or the medium has changed. very clear deconstruction of the stock market, on how false the entire thing is because it's just about acquiring money to have money. stock brokers and managers live in the future because they are trying to project the present and the past forward to uncover esoteric information that will help them make good Wall Street bets or whatever.

Right now it's nearly midnight and I'm barely able to stay awake through this review so I might come back in the morning with more thoughts. I do have more and I hope they make sense in 8 hours

On Living in the Future, as they were talking about: the security guy. Constantly talking about a threat ahead and how they NEED to avoid it. They have to give in to the fear of potential death in the future by changing what they do NOW. Spoilers ahead:

So like, he has to kill his feeling of danger, right? It's preventing him from living how he wants to live. He can't even go get his hair cut because of this shit. So he does. The security dude never uses his gun, why have it if you don't use it? So Rpats does. Security dude could not anticipate a random act of violence, his danger sense failed because he wasn't paying attention to The Current Moment, the clear and present danger an active firearm represents. Instead, he's still thinking about the future.

next time I watch this, I think I'll get it. He gradually extracts himself from the future and starts living in the moment. All of these characters represent elements of the psyche within Robert Pattinson. anxiety, urgency, analytical thought, abstract thought, patience, honesty, And I think Eric is Conscious Thoughts/experience. All of this scattered information is coming through to him and he has to process it into something coherent which is what our brains do. David loves doing this kind of shit. I will try again someday, my friend.

It's crazy watching this it a post covid world. I fully felt the nasal swab scene. I think he did a great job making me feel a lot of these scenes up in my body.

This is another Cronenberg tradition: You need a weird spindly brunette with intense eyes engaging in weird behavior. And boy does he ever get weird with it! I love this exploration of like giving your body over to the idea of a celebrity. inviting suffering they have experienced into your own body, creating an entire industry around the pain and suffering of celebrities, interesting the way the background celebrity news touched on the subjects of conservatorships and emotional meltdowns in starlets.

Hey wait a second that sounds a bit too close to real life! It's not that I want to directly compare Brandon and David but he IS literally using some of his father's vocabulary here with Deformed Children and Physical Manifestation. in David cronenberg's work, we did a lot of exploration of people physically manifesting their own internal repressed traumas on their bodies and here we are seeing the manifestation of someone else's trauma on us. The giving over of our body to someone else. It's similar to what we had with Crash and recreating fatal celebrity motor collisions. here, by the end, our protagonist is having his own body picked over and struggled over just like Hannah Geist's body and it was killing him until he gave in and started selling his own body on his own terms. everyone else is making decisions for him until he said fine, I accept that I am this target, if I want to have any control I have to sell myself on those terms.

There's a really cool scene with a mirror at one point where the bevel on the edge creates a split in the reflection and our protagonist is able to visually have his finger move in and out of a rash as if it is being fingered. That was a pretty cool shot. probably purely coincidental that the same rash gets physically forcefully penetrated later. I'm onto your games, Brandon...

This one is a real treat for the cronenheads. He pulls from nearly his entire developed vocabulary for Maps: the proxy-performance therapy from The Brood and using other people to relive trauma and the direct discussion of "deformed children", the proxy touching and sibling stuff (Dead Ringers), the projection of the past onto present (Spider), the layers between us and the things that happen to us (eXistenZ), the philosophy underlying media (Videodrome), the "stunt" casting and physical embodiment of roles (Crash), "the subject must love the researcher" returning all the way from (Stereo), and on and on. This really stands as a culmination of his messaging re: the dangers of repression and the need for release.

The cast gave incredible performances on this one. Benjy in particular, as a child actor playing the role of a child actor who experienced sexual assault that is reflected in his big role. This is the real "stunt" casting. The changes in demeanor as these characters regress and progress mid conversation really worked for me.

Also some great shot comp in this one, David played his usual games with shadows and reflections for the glimpses into the characters' headspace, we had thematic books, god, there was even thematic shitting and farting. Lots of the "therapy seats" going on in these scenes.

This is a very particularly rewarding watch if you have been watching all of Cronenberg's works in a row. I genuinely cannot overstate how much he is playing with the refined vocabulary he has developed over his entire career, the same symbols, the same messages and themes, just sharpened. And he moves fast with it. He expects you to know the grammar by now. We have a pretty full and clear image of the past and present of all these characters by the end, we have seen them act it all out from different perspectives. We fill in blanks with the connections to real life actors and public trauma. Everything fits together neatly and builds a rich structure for the events of the film to happen on. It's just good movies, folks

Devastating ending. The final poem recitation, delivered with none of the cheer and humor and charisma on display in the first portion of the film. Raw and real and grave. After watching him die, hearing that poem just killed me.

Watching that charisma drain from him as the movie progressed, as he really just started being crushed by the weight of his fate, it's hard. His morbid sense of humor really reveals how much weight it was carrying through his life once it's no longer present. If you can't laugh about your disease, what else can you do? And the answer is "Die."

Something that really stuck out to me was how all these people, the family members, the friends, Sara and Sheree and Bob, all their relationships were hard. Messy. Difficult to for everyone to understand each other. But they still stuck it out, they were all still this network of support, no one was alone. Seeing the way his father tried to come to terms with it, the comparison to trapeze, honestly such a good image to explain his feelings about watching his son do all of these things to his body.

I don't remember the exact wording but I read the book Which As You Know Means Violence (beautiful book btw, read it, it's short) and the section on Bob Flanagan included a quote about how, as the end was approaching, he wasn't excited about the prospect of being injured anymore. It just simply Hurt. And you can see it manifest within him in this film.

This documentary will make you fall in love with Bob and then it will show you his death. It hurts. It's supposed to. It's what Bob wanted.

Viggo Mortensen descends in a testicle in this movie. Kristen Stewart probes his hole with a rod and gets off on it. He gets a zipper installed on lower abdomen and his partner makes out with him. He eats in a high chair and struggles like a baby would. It's a pretty rich film.

This is even more of a referential film than maps to the stars, partially because it references Maps to the stars. and the brood, and eXistenZ. and the fly and videodrome and Eastern promises and and. Oh and obviously crimes of the future. whenever the mother basically directly quotes Geena Davis from the fly, I locked in. The film follows a very similar arc to the first crimes of the future, with the concepts surrounding a lack of some aspect we thought fundamental to sex/life/pain and how we find new ways to fill in that space. subversion and deviance and all that. It really feels like the film itself, an older man reflecting on his past artwork and trying to find new beauty and new methods of portraying that beauty. This would have been an excellent moment to pivot to black and white films for Cronenberg but I don't think the shrouds does that unfortunately.

I can't talk about this movie without addressing the scars on his abdomen that resemble those after a hysterectomy or vaginoplasty. The sark table utilizes tools that resemble the ones from dead ringers that were specifically designed for gynecological usage. The film itself heavily revolves around the removal of "useless" organs. modifying the body to be the way you want it to be and sharing that experience. someone has to address the gender in the room. It harkens back to M butterfly and how the beauty is in the performance, not in the facts.

As I have gone through cronenberg's body of work, it gets harder and harder to condense these films down into a succinct review because they are so much bigger than their own scripts in the way that they reference all of his films and things in the real world. This is what they're talking about in videodrome as the difference between media that has philosophy and media that does not. even as I'm talking about this, I'm making connections to old films like rabid and shivers and how the same ideas were manifesting back then and I just did not realize it. He has gotten better at vain ideas but it's mostly just been getting better at the process of film production. those older scripts still have the depth that's going on here. eventually I will have to go through this Cronenberg list again

I was not prepared for the thorough sobbing Vital induced in me. This movie is absolutely hypnotic in its delivery and the story within that delivery is beautiful. It's maybe one of the most beautiful stories I've seen period.

It's hard to believe this movie is only ~80 minutes. It covers so much ground and develops all of these characters so deeply. It "fleshes" them out haha

I already have a weakness for stories about processing grief and this one has a hell of a lot to say about the subject. The rituals that the living perform and the way we honor the wishes of the dead, the very personal connections compared to the broader societal expectations surrounding grief and trauma and death. There's a very real way that Ryoko is living on through the bodies of these characters around her, how she exists in the space between all of these people and her corpse and how a relationship can still develop and grow and change within that space.

Tsukamoto makes every scene look and sound exactly like how the characters are feeling. Yeah yeah, "say the line, Fidelity" it's a bridge between the worlds of Feeling and Perception. The movie builds this emotional connection to the rain and it pays off with a scene that just put me on my ass. "If there was a moment you could revisit years after you die, what would it be...?"

There's something so juicy about the final memory, how it's an experience only Ryoko can have. The viewer cannot take part because she notes how "it smells amazing." We got to witness every sense and sensation on screen but the final one, the most important, we can't take part. It's such a beautiful movie.

Holy shit this movie is good. And it gives me a perfect pairing to go with Vital on my Cronenberg list.

He went CRAZY with the framing of light and shadow in this one. It plays so well with the thematic structures around hiding and revealing, seeing and avoiding, remembering and experiencing. It manages a very topical exploration of concerns surrounding AI, particularly how much we trust it and who is operating it. The feelings we project onto it.

A lot of Karsh's characterization revolves around a line very early on: "I'm a non-practicing atheist." He does not believe in god or the afterlife, it seems, but he DOES love and worship this idea of his wife. He has a conception of her soul, he treats her requests as if they still have weight, he cannot let go of her. We see how he projects her into and onto every thing and every one even though she's not in any of those places. And yet, as a simulacrum of her, they did work for him. He was fully deceived by Hunny, Terry made sure to highlight her own status as proxy, Soo-min talks about how she's using HIM as a proxy.

There's a lot of heartbreaking stuff in this movie, too. The realization that we get about him abstaining from kissing his wife as she was dying. The delivery of the line "Am I too mutilated?" The ending. Also just the geteral exploration of death rituals and Closure that this movie presents. As long as he doesn't look at her dead body with his physical bodily senses, she isn't dead. Schrodinger's grave. He can look for her everywhere. I believe the line was "Her body. it's the whole world. It's hard to explain..."

That shit is layered on top of the other aspect of physical evidence: the conspiracy spinning throughout the movie. We never get the evidence we need to draw a solid conclusion about ANYTHING. The way we have multiple shots in the film dedicated to us seeing the character's hand holding a cell phone to watch important footage. It's all about putting layers between us and themscary facts. If we do not see it personally, we can let it linger in our heads indefinitely. The layers of separation are also played up with the layers of tissue between our sight and our bones. And this is barely scratching the surface. There's soooo much going on with this film and it's as cronenreferential as the previous few entries. I also just have a soft spot for grief movies