The Fly

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.
Screening Schedule

No physical screenings scheduled.

Direction: David Cronenberg
Script: Charles Edward Pogue, David Cronenberg
Cinematography: Mark Irwin
Editing: Ronald Sanders
Music: Howard Shore
Actors: Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis, John Getz, Joy Boushel, Les Carlson, George Chuvalo, David Cronenberg
Production: SLM Production Group, Brooksfilms
Producers: Stuart Cornfeld
Format: DCP
Color: Color
Production Country: USA
Production Year: 1986
Duration: 96'
Contact: Park Circus
Awards/Distinctions: Best Horror Film, Best Actor, Best Makeup – American Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films 1987, Special Jury Award – Avoriaz FFF 1987, Best Makeup – Academy Awards 1987, Best Cinematography in Theatrical Feature – Canadian Society of Cinematographers 1987

David Cronenberg

David Cronenberg seems to be split, much like his film heroes. Some critics think of him as a cynical maker of distinguishing and commercially successful splatter films, often referred to as “video nasties” in Britain. The part of the public that accepts him as such sees in his films the moral decline of our age, comparable to the Roman decline during the time of Caligula – a reflection of the morbid glamour in our industrial societies. Some other critics think of him as a subversive and iconoclastic metteur-en-scéne, a deliberately embarrassing intellectual, who, through his metaphors, uncovers the social “evil”– of that Roman decline kind. The truth does not lie in the middle: David Cronenberg makes films that offend order and decency (values inherent in the Canadian landscape and society), films offering no escape; cinematic nightmares, mystic, haunting, and gruesome images in which horror emerges from the human body or arises from the separation of the physical and the immaterial.

Filmography

1969 Stereo
1977 Rabid
1981 Scanners
1986 The Fly
1988 Dead Ringers
1991 Naked Lunch
1996 Crash
2002 Spider
2005 A History of Violence
2007 Eastern Promises
2012 Cosmopolis
2014 Maps to the Stars
2022 Crimes of the Future
2024 The Shrouds