For Fans of David Cronenberg

The Fly is the more polished film, but Videodrome is the one that tells you exactly what Cronenberg is doing and why. It takes a trash premise (a cable TV programmer stumbles onto a snuff signal) and converts it into a full-blooded theory of media, desire, and the hallucination of selfhood. It is also genuinely difficult to parse on first viewing, which is the point. Come back to it after The Fly and it will read completely differently.

Crash and eXistenZ get the cult attention, but Dead Ringers is where Cronenberg's coolness reaches something close to devastating. Twin gynecologists collapsing into each other is a premise that could have been camp, and Cronenberg makes it genuinely tragic. Jeremy Irons gives two performances that are indistinguishable and completely different. It is the most emotionally honest film Cronenberg ever made, which is a strange thing to say about a film this cold.

Possessor (2020) shares DNA with the Cronenberg canon so precisely that calling it derivative would be lazy. Brandon Cronenberg has a colder, more nihilistic sensibility than his father, less interested in seduction and more in pure erasure. The corporate assassination plot is almost irrelevant. The film is about what it feels like to not be inside your own body, and it is one of the most unpleasant experiences available in contemporary horror. That is a recommendation.

The late-game revelation in Bloodborne (the Great Ones, the cosmic birth, the transformation of the hunter) operates on exactly the logic Cronenberg has spent a career exploring: forbidden knowledge physically restructures the body that receives it. The Victorian setting is a false frame. The real subject is the same as Scanners, the same as The Fly: what happens to the flesh when the mind expands past what the flesh was designed to hold.