Speaking of Canadian’s with a kinky attitude towards sex, check out this trailer for director David Cronenberg’s next feature, a film about the relationship between Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung and their masochistic female patient, featuring a fair bit of costume drama and kink.
Cronenberg’s had an interesting career trajectory. His early films, such as Shivers (aphrodisiac parasites spread through a Montreal apartment complex) and The Brood (people start externalizing their psychologies through literal bodily transformations), were far more experimental and visceral and political, in the best traditions of 1970s horror films.
Over the decades, he’s become a lot more respectable. He complains in interviews that he is still listed in IMDB as “Dave ‘Deprave’ Cronenberg”. While I still consider myself a Cronenberg fan, and I respect his career decisions, I also feel that his latest films just aren’t as gripping as his earlier works. If I wanted to sell people on the idea that Cronenberg is a great director, I’d show them Dead Ringers or Crash, not Spider or Eastern Promises.
You can see the same concerns in his latter works like Eastern Promises or A History of Violence as in his middle period The Fly: a man struggling against his transformation into a monster. I still maintain The Fly is the superior work.
My hope is that this story will allow Cronenberg to loosen up a little and not understate his themes.
