For more than 50 years, Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg has been crafting strange tales of disquieting physicality, challenging morality, and rich dramatic nuance. He may be most famous for acclaimed scary movies that typified the so-called “body horror” genre — iconic nightmares like “The Fly” and “The Brood” gave birth to the adjective “Cronenbergian” — but he’s repeatedly proven himself a chameleon, capable of also directing satisfying macho race-car dramas, romantic period pieces, and pulpy crime thrillers. To explore the films of David Cronenberg is to perform a delicate autopsy on the guts of independent cinema, and probe the psyche of some of the most intelligent genre films ever produced.
22. “Maps to the Stars” (2014)
Cronenberg’s sweeping ensemble satire about corrupted celebrity struggles to fit all the pieces on the board. Julianne Moore plays an actress losing touch with reality; Mia Wasikowska is her creepy pyromaniac personal assistant; John Cusack is a TV psychologist with a dark secret; Evan Bird is his ultra-famous son fresh out of rehab; Robert Pattinson plays a limo driver with big dreams; and Carrie Fisher plays herself. Their story has vast Shakespearean undertones, but Cronenberg’s perspective on Hollywood culture never feels completely sincere. “Maps to the Stars” plays more like a harsh observation than an insightful critique.
21. “Stereo (Tile 3B of a CAEE Educational Mosaic)” (1969)
The first feature-length film by Cronenberg is a silent experimental story about students engaged in an telepathic test, merging minds and exploring the limits of their psychic sexuality in a vast, unpopulated building. Shot without dialogue but narrated with the self-serious monotone of an educational film, “Stereo” hints at Cronenberg’s future obsessions (surely there is a direct line between this and “Scanners”). As intriguing and promising as it is, it’s also narratively opaque to a fault, making even a scant 63 minutes seem long.
20. “Crimes of the Future” (1970)
Cronenberg’s second feature, also silent (with voiceovers), tells the story of a dystopian future where adult women are dying from a plague and male scientists engage in increasingly weird and terrible experiments to cope. More narratively ambitious than “Stereo,” and also more grotesque. “Crimes of the Future” hints at Cronenberg’s twisted sense of humor before turning uncomfortably monstrous, and the voiceovers often do more to confuse and obscure the issues than to illuminate anything about them.
19. “M. Butterfly” (1993)
One of the more unusual entries in Cronenberg’s filmography, this surprisingly straightforward adaptation of David Henry Hwang’s Tony Award–winning play tells the story of real-life French diplomat David Boursicot (Jeremy Irons), who was seduced by a Peking Opera singer in Beijing and tricked into revealing government secrets over the course of their affair. Handsomely produced, but Jeremy Irons plays the most British French person in history, which is endlessly distracting. Beyond that, Cronenberg’s focus is solely on their love affair, often undermining the story’s themes of cultural appropriation and sexual identity. Though hardly a wash, Cronenberg’s interpretation is oddly uninspired.
18. “Crimes of the Future” (2022)
In the near future, humanity has lost its capacity to feel pain, and live surgical shows have become the arthouse blockbuster entertainments of the era. Viggo Mortensen stars as an artist who grows mysterious new organs and removes them in his shows. Over the course of the film, he runs into obsessive groupies, uncomfortably supportive government agencies and a vast conspiracy about mutants who eat plastic. “Crimes of the Future” is not a remake of Cronenberg’s second film, although the organ-harvesting plot harkens back to it. Instead seems to be a weird satire of Cronenberg’s own, unusual place in the art community, funnier than most of his works and bitingly self-aware. Eventually, however, the plot takes hold, the commentary falls off and “Crimes of the Future” abandons almost all its threads for an unsatisfactory conclusion.
17. “Scanners” (1981)
Cronenberg delves into comic-book territory with “Scanners,” a sci-fi action thriller about a secret group of people with psychic abilities that can be used for good or evil. The film’s best set pieces are unforgettable, with perhaps cinema’s most notorious exploding head, and Michael Ironside is captivatingly diabolical as the leader of the rogue Scanner sect. Unfortunately, Cronenberg often gets mired in talky world-building, wrecking the pacing completely, and the film’s heroic star, Stephen Lack, doesn’t have half of Ironside’s on-screen charisma.
16. “Rabid” (1977)
Famous adult star Marilyn Chambers stars in Cronenberg’s version of a modern vampire story about a woman who gets injured in a motorcycle crash near an experimental clinic that saves her life by giving her a bizarre new organ in her armpit. Through this new orifice, she feeds on human blood, spreading her frightening condition across Canada like a sexually transmitted infection. The ideas behind “Rabid” are frightening, and Chambers is admirable in the lead role, but Cronenberg sometimes gets a little too mired in the medical drama, leaving a surprising amount of the horror on the table. It’s a scary horror movie. It’s just not one of his strongest works.
15. “Fast Company” (1979)
If you couldn’t see David Cronenberg’s name in the credits, you might never know that this excellent racing drama was his work. The filmmaker seems to have almost completely hidden his usual artistic proclivities to tell this macho tale of traveling funny-car racers whose corrupt promoter, played by an excellently sleazy John Saxon, works overtime to wreck their careers. Big on realism but short on plot, “Fast Company” boasts the absorbing attention to detail usually found in a Michael Mann film, at least until the film’s unexpectedly explosive finale. It’s a handsome work no matter how “Cronenebergian” it is (or, more to the point, isn’t).
14. “Eastern Promises” (2007)
Cronenberg doesn’t quite disappear into this impressive crime drama the way he did into “Fast Company,” but it still feels like another outlier. Naomi Watts plays a midwife investigating the death of a Russian teenaged mother in the hopes of finding a home for the baby, but her journey takes her deep into the criminal underworld where an enigmatic fixer, played by Viggo Mortensen, is on a rise to power. Stylish and brutal, “Eastern Promises” is mostly a fantastic crime thriller, but Watts’ character quickly becomes superfluous to the story, which eventually goes off in its own direction. Your mileage may vary on how satisfying you find that to be.
13. “Cosmopolis” (2012)
Robert Pattinson plays a billionaire who seems to live entirely in his limousine, which drives around Manhattan perpetually monitoring the hoi polloi, while never being a part of them. “Cosmopolis” is a strange, episodic tale of economic and cultural isolation, incredibly bitter about class warfare in the 21st century, while uncomfortably fascinated by the alien creatures who rise to the top in capitalist systems. Pattinson is perfectly bizarre, and Cronenberg’s direction is deliriously inspired in a film with so much to say about our modern state of affairs that you might need a spreadsheet to keep all the themes straight.
12. “The Brood” (1979)
In some ways Cronenberg’s most conventional horror movie yet still astoundingly grotesque. “The Brood” tells the story of a man whose wife is undergoing bizarre psychiatric treatment by a doctor, played by Oliver Reed, who refuses to let her see her family. Meanwhile, her family is being stalked by monstrous killers who look like mutated children. Scenes of homicidal violence taking place in the middle of a school classroom are as shocking as ever, and the film’s unforgettable conclusion is truly wild. A classic horror film that never goes quite where you’d expect.
11. “Spider” (2002)
Barely released and often overlooked, “Spider” is one of Cronenberg’s best films and finest acting showcases. Ralph Fiennes plays a mentally ill man, who is released from an institution and finds himself struggling to connect the memories of his traumatic childhood, which may be real, may be delusions, or may be a frightening jumble of both. Miranda Richardson plays his mother, or possibly the woman who killed and impersonated his mother, in an upsettingly sad story with an impossibly complicated protagonist. It’s a quiet, twisted character piece, nowhere near as flashy as many of Cronenberg’s more famous works. Fiennes has never been better, which is really saying something.
10. “A Dangerous Method” (2011)
Michael Fassbender plays Carl Jung, Viggo Mortensen plays Sigmund Freud and Keira Knightley plays Sabina Spielrein in Cronenberg’s fantastic historical drama about the dawn of psychoanalysis. These intellectual titans, revered in their fields, are laid bare as deeply flawed individuals whose observations about the human mind often belied their petty grievances and uncontrollable desires. Cronenberg’s films have often been about the relationship between the mind and the body, but with “A Dangerous Method,” he focuses predominantly on the human psyche as it struggles to overcome the needs of the flesh. The end result, a poignant work with excellent performances from the whole cast, particularly Knightley.
9. “eXistenZ” (1999)
Cronenberg’s take on virtual reality came out the same year as “The Matrix” and, in its own way, it’s just as cool and subversive. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays the inventor of an immersive new video game experience and Jude Law plays her security guard. Together, they’re trapped in a bizarre online world of creepy NPCs, conspiracies to rid the world of false realities and roasted chickens that can turn into guns. Incredibly inventive and kinky, with great performances and smart commentaries about escapism and the subconscious. “eXistenZ” is a twisted treat.
8. “Naked Lunch” (1991)
As “The Simpsons” famously said, “I can think of two things wrong with that title.” Then again, maybe there’s a third: Cronenberg’s film version of William S. Burroughs’ impenetrable 1959 novel isn’t so much an adaptation as a psychedelic treatise on Burroughs himself, a Beat Poet who allegedly shot and killed his own wife in an intoxicated game of “William Tell.” Peter Weller plays Lee/Burroughs, a drug-addicted artist whose reality becomes intertwined with a freakish world of insectoid creatures, including living typewriters and drug-secreting centipedes. Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch” ambitiously blurs the line between adaptation, biopic,and fantasy; it’s one of the most potent films about the writing experience, in all its harrowing horror.
7. “A History of Violence” (2005)
Viggo Mortensen runs a diner in a small town with his loving wife and two children, but when he kills two would-be robbers in self-defense — and proves strangely skilled at the art of murder — it attracts unwanted attention, revealing his true identity as a mob enforcer living in hiding. It’s a pulpy premise but Cronenberg, adapting a graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke, uses these revelations to explore familial deception, and the power that violence has to change lives in unexpected and uncomfortable ways. All the performances are exceptional in a film that successfully marries Cronenberg’s psychological fascinations with a smart crime plot.
6. “Crash” (1996)
In what may be Cronenberg’s most controversial film, James Spader plays a TV producer who gets in a horrible car wreck, unexpectedly bonding him with the only other survivor, played by Holly Hunter. Together they fall under the spell of an automobile-accident enthusiast (Elias Koteas) whose obsession with vehicular violence is potently sexual and inspires cult-like fervor in his followers. Koteas steals the show as a fascinatingly creepy quasi-religious leader, and Spader hauntingly portrays a lost soul searching for deeper truths and sexual meaning in something as mundane as traffic, and as cataclysmic as a car crash.
5. “Shivers” (1975)
An isolated high-rise apartment community falls victim to a terrifying parasite that neutralizes all inhibitions, transforming all the residents into hedonistic, murderous, sex-driven monsters. “Shivers” is Cronenberg’s most terrifying motion picture, utterly cynical about the human condition, presented with all the matter-of-fact style of an industrial hygiene film. Who cares if the parasites are so cheap it’s almost comical? There’s nothing funny about the nightmare that ensues.
4. “The Dead Zone” (1983)
Cronenberg’s adaptation of Stephen King’s best-selling novel, starring Christopher Walken as a teacher who develops the power to see the future but loses everything else in his life, is anything but a conventional horror thriller. The episodic structure features serial killers, mass death tragedies and a terrifying hypothetical moral question that everyone asks but only Walken’s tormented protagonist actually needs to contemplate in real life. Walken is superlative (this may be his finest performance), and Cronenberg nimbly balances King’s broader storytelling strokes with all the complex philosophical themes that “The Dead Zone” raises.
3. “Videodrome” (1983)
The Cronenbergiest of all Cronenberg films, “Videodrome” stars James Woods as an amoral TV executive who becomes obsessed with a pirated station that airs snuff films for entertainment. Along the way, he discovers that this “Videodrome” is part of a vast conspiracy involving brain tumors and mass desensitization to sex and violence, his body transforming along the way into a fleshy Betamax tape player that’s also a human gun. And that’s barely scratching this surface of “Videodrome’s” lofty ideas and unforgettably freaky imagery.
2. “The Fly” (1986)
Cronenberg’s remake of the already exceptional 1958 monster movie “The Fly” keeps most of the plot intact but shifts the focus from a high-concept monster movie with a shocking final scene to a mournful allegory for dying slowly, painfully and without dignity from a terrible disease. Jeff Goldblum plays a scientist, who accidentally splices his genes with a fly, and Geena Davis co-stars as the woman, who watches him gradually deteriorate as she debates whether or not to keep his child, who might also suffer from his awful fate. The most disgusting and fascinating make-up effects movie history can be found in David Cronenberg’s “The Fly,” along with one of the saddest and most profound horror stories ever told.
1. “Dead Ringers” (1988)
Jeremy Irons gives two of the finest cinematic performances in David Cronenberg’s disturbing psychological thriller, as a pair of identical-twin gynecologists who share lovers without telling the women in their lives. When the more sensitive twin falls in love and becomes addicted to drugs, it sends them on a perversely intriguing journey of commingled madness as their personalities intertwine, their vices become one and their obsessions lead to unthinkable tragedy. Aided by expert editing, Irons is so convincing it’s almost hard to believe there was only one of him, and the protagonist’s shared fixation on flesh and mind give Cronenberg an opportunity to perfectly blend his flare for the macabre and knack for human drama.
