COSMOPOLIS

Technology allows capitalism to transcend humanity, and one man tries—and fails—to evolve toward salvation. Adapting an allegedly unfilmable Don DeLillo novel, David Cronenberg’s COSMOPOLIS relates 28-year-old financial wunderkind and billionaire Eric Packer’s (Robert Pattinson) daylong, cross-town quest to get a haircut. Along the way, there will be time enough for sexual trysts, political violence, a celebrity funeral, and the depredations of the Pastry Assassin. Meanwhile, Packer’s currency speculations turn self-destructive, revealing an urge that will eventually manifest itself in a far more extreme fashion.

For the first two decades of his career David Cronenberg was an aerodynamic funnel for an iconoclastic spin on gender, sexuality, media and economic theory and the ways they horrifically manifest themselves through human bodies. With COSMOPOLIS, he leaves bodies behind and plunges ahead into the realm of total dematerialisation.

“Diamond-hard and dazzlingly brilliant, David Cronenberg’s COSMOPOLIS plays like a deeply perverse, darkly comic successor to VIDEODROME. Where the earlier film pioneered disturbingly anatomical ways to interface with the televisual, COSMOPOLIS delivers an excursion into the immersive ubiquity of the virtual, basking in the refulgent glow of cyber-capital.” - Budd Wilkins

“Cronenberg presents talk (great reams of the stuff) as a kind of mutual infection between emotionally incomplete monsters, trying and failing to shape the world in their image. After spending years making prestige and genre films, Cronenberg returned to the crystal waters of the wired mind-benders from his early years and found he could still swim beautifully.” - Scout Tafoya