The Poppies of Terra #65 - A-Frames for B-Movies

David Cronenberg’s work casts a long and splendidly disfiguring shadow over the filmmaking generations who’ve followed him. 

His half-century plus of directing has influenced countless contemporary voices, including some of today’s most prominent cineasts, such as Guillermo del Toro, Yorgos Lanthimos, Luca Guadagnino, Vincenzo Natali, Ari Aster, Nicolas Winding Refn, Julia Ducournau, Jennifer Kent, Robert Eggers, Bong Joon-ho, Karyn Kusama, David Robert Mitchell, and Coralie Fargeat, to name a few who have explicitly avowed the Canadian master’s influence.

Unsurprisingly, Cronenberg’s work has been extensively written about by pop culture enthusiasts, as well as dissected by academics, both of whom often delve deep into his penchant for body horror and obsessive psyches.

A specific aspect of his work that appeals to me is his treatment of scientists. While often presented as unethical and compulsive personalities, they’re nevertheless depicted with seriousness and sympathy. Indeed, in an interview documented in Cronenberg on Cronenberg (ed. Chris Rodley, 1997), he said: “I think the best scientists are as mad, creative and eccentric as writers and artists of any kind. I feel a lot of empathy for doctors and scientists. I often feel that they are my persona in my films. Although they may be tragic and demented, I don’t subscribe to the view that they are playing with things that shouldn’t be played with.” 

The evidence is up on the screen. Dr. Emil Hobbes in Shivers (1975) creates parasites intended to liberate people from social inhibitions, but ends up unleashing a sexual frenzy epidemic. Rabid’s (1977) Dr. Dan Keloid reckless experiments cause another viral outbreak. Dr. Hal Raglan, from The Brood (1979), is a psychotherapist who practices “psychoplasmics,” an imagined therapy that manifests patients’ trauma as parthogenetically-born creatures. The drug trials of Scanners’ (1981) Dr. Paul Ruth leads to the creation of the titular telepathic individuals. And who could forget Dead Ringers’ (1988) Mantle twins, codependent gynecologists with an affinity for illicit substances and experimental medical tools. 

In the same interview as before, Cronenberg recollects: “We had a physics professor [at the University of Toronto] who would start his class whether there was anyone there or not. You could be the first to arrive and half the board was already covered with figures and he was talking. No one in the class. He was going to start at ten after the hour and that was that.” If only that was the extent of Cronenberg’s scientists’ eccentricities…

“Fear that human values will be sacrificed in the untrammeled search for knowledge,” notes Andrew Tudor in Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie (1991), “is at the heart of so many of these [mad-scientist] movies.” As the philosopher Christopher Frayling writes in Mad, Bad and Dangerous?: The Scientist and the Cinema (2005), the figure of the mad scientist is by no means peripheral in modern pop culture, but is rather a core part of our self-perception: “The real creation myth of modern times is not Darwin, not Genesis; it is Frankenstein.” Noted genre writer David J. Skal, in Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture (1998), explicitly discusses Cronenberg’s numerous contributions to this trope.

There appears to be a growing sub-niche of films that not only play with the unleashed scientist motif in the Cronenbergian tradition, but share other commonalities: low budgets, cerebral blends of science fiction and horror, retro-futuristic visuals, synth-heavy scores, and a bucket or two of gore. Cue, for instance Pannos Cosmatos’ Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010), Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor (2020), and Laura Moss’ Birth/Rebirth (2023). 

This unique lineage finds its latest expression in two films, recently available on digital platforms, that exemplify both the promise and pitfalls of the Cronenbergian inheritance. For all intents and purposes, these are B-movies approached with A-levels of stylistic flair and conviction.

The first is by David Cronenberg himself. The Shrouds (2024), the maestro’s sixteenth feature, introduces us to a near-future world in which a widower (Vincent Cassel) devises a new technology which allows the real-time monitoring of the dead. “Grief is rotting your teeth” is the film’s opening line, immediately signaling a screenplay not shy about its themes. Cronenberg made this movie following the death of his wife in real life, and so in addition to his usual ploy of working through certain ideas in his script, in this case he also seems to be working through certain mental states, including avoidance. 

While the initial premise and its embellishments are intriguing, and there are sharply observed moments, along with flashes of humor–“You own a restaurant at a cemetery”–on the whole I found this dull. One senses that the veteran cast is following Cronenberg’s direction expertly, with Diane Kruger a standout in dual roles, but his writing here doesn’t feel up to his usual standards. We’ve come to expect mannered lines in the service of almost inscrutable abstractions: here we get a little of that, alas juxtaposed with oodles of awkward, teen-like naturalism (“Wow”; “Way”; “No way”; “He’s a complete schmuck,” etc). Certain scenes that might be riveting or hypnotic go on too long and feel like placeholders for better-realized sequences. 

How cinematic is grief? Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Blue (the first in his famed Three Colours trilogy) is a powerful experience. Peter Weir’s Fearless is a searing masterpiece. There are dozens of others. But what they have in common, and what’s lacking in The Shrouds, is the combination of grief with a cocktail of other complicating–and humanizing–elements: imposed freedom, an awakening of the self, survivor’s guilt, and so on. Kenneth Lonergan’s much-lauded Manchester by the Sea is a film I detest because once you figure out that it seeks to cinematically replicate the numbness-stage of grief, it has nothing else to say, and it spends a very long time doing so. Unfortunately, The Shrouds has more in common with this movie than the other preceding examples.

Cronenberg is renowned for a refined and detached aesthetic, but here I found it made the proceedings humdrum rather than memorable. “The scientist who does not face up to the warning in this persistent folklore of mad doctors is himself the worst enemy of science,” writes Grayling in his book. “In these images of our popular culture resides a legitimate public fear of the scientists’ stripped-down, depersonalized conception of knowledge.” While Karsh, The Shrouds’ protagonist, is a businessman rather than a scientist, he is an inventor, and he has developed a device many find repulsive, so he kinda fits the bill. His character begins with Grayling’s depersonalized approach to knowledge, and the film’s instigating event, the loss of his wife, leads him to personify depersonalization itself. The film, as we chase down–to borrow a phrase from the title of Octavio Paz’s famous book–the labyrinth of solitude, becomes sterility embodied, decomposition composed. 

Yet the plot diversions—conspiracy elements, erotic shenanigans, political intrigue—ultimately feel like elaborate procrastination, mirroring Karsh’s own evasion of genuine emotional reckoning. And while that may be part of what Cronenberg is saying about grief, it doesn’t make for a compelling two hours. Catharsis is replaced with endurance.

A case, perhaps, of the emperor’s new cloak–or, in this case, shroud.

In Calvin Lee Reeder’s The A-Frame (2025), which injects cosmic dread and some limited body horror into a cancer drama, Johnny Whitworth’s Sam is one of those quintessential amoral scientists. Sam has invented a machine that can tunnel to a subatomic universe which connects with alternate dimensions, and inadvertently seems to cure cancer. But he needs human subjects. Enter Dana Namerode’s Donna, who has cancer in her hand. She’s told only an amputation will address her condition, which is particularly troublesome, given that she’s a pianist.

Namerode’s performance provides the quiet, grounded foil to Whitworth’s entertainingly flashy, Jeff Bridges-meets-Kurt Russell persona. While The A-Frame is most clearly in direct conversation with Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), it also plays like an extended episode of The Outer Limits, is in parts reminiscent of Re-Animator (1985) and From Beyond (1986), and contains a fun Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) reference. The sequence in which Donna inserts her hand into the dislocator evokes the famous Dune scene involving Paul and the pain box. There are other nice production touches: the cinematography, often dwelling on power lines, embraces mirror images and symmetrical reversals; the backdrop of an opening scene at a New Age center contains an inversion of the triangle that shows up later; David Wingo’s synth score gets under the skin, and so on.

Fans of practical effects for gore over CGI will also be pleased. Though relatively scant, Reeder knows when to pull the trigger for maximum gross-out factor, further amplifying the movie’s resonance with The Fly. Is the ending surprising? No. Does the story feel a bit padded? Sure. But I was engaged the whole time, and smiled often.

Both of these films pose the same implicit question about how far we’re willing to follow their protagonists into ethical and existential uncertainties. But only one of them provides a dramatically engaging answer. “How dark are you willing to go?” Karsh says near the start of The Shrouds. At the end of The A-Frame, I found myself answering: “This will do.”