THE FLY

The Fly is an entertaining patchwork that stitches together all the alluring delights to be found in the cinema of David Cronenberg, combining science fiction, the body horror sub-genre, and romantic drama with a dystopian future. While trying to perfect his experiments in the teleportation of matter, physicist Seth Brundle meets journalist Veronica Quaife. The pair become lovers, and Veronica starts observing the scientific work being conducted by Seth, who decides to use himself as a human guinea pig. A fleeting moment of bad luck, however, results in his gradual genetic transformation into an enormous fly, with inexorable consequences. This theme of transformation – perhaps the most steadfast touchstone of Cronenberg’s oeuvre, with all its countless allegorical ramifications – here becomes the vehicle for a thrilling metaphor that touches on senescence, mortality, the inevitability of death, the elusiveness of love, and the underlying essence of the human condition in a film that unfurls like a Kafkaesque dream – without a clear beginning, but with a most certain end.