Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
Blank-faced bug killer Bill Lee and his dead-eyed wife, Joan, like to get high on Bill's pest poisons while lounging with Beat poet pals. After meeting the devilish Dr. Benway, Bill gets a drug made from a centipede. Upon indulging, he accidentally kills Joan, takes orders from his typewriter-turned-cockroach, ends up in a constantly mutating Mediterranean city and learns that his hip friends have published his work -- which he doesn't remember writing.
Cronenberg's adaptation of the supposedly unfilmable Burroughs novel is a genuinely singular achievement in surrealist cinema, blending autobiography, hallucination, and meta-fiction into something wholly its own. The novelty is undeniable — no other film quite looks, feels, or operates like this one. The cinematography has Cronenberg's trademark clinical grotesquerie with Peter Suschitzky's cold, expressionistic framing. Acting is serviceable, with Peter Weller's famously deadpan performance fitting the material but leaving little emotional texture. The plot, such as it is, deliberately resists coherence — engaging as an experience but frustrating as narrative. The ending dissipates rather than resolves, feeling like an ellipsis rather than a conclusion, which may be intentional but is nonetheless unsatisfying.