116 mins - Canada / United Kingdom / Japan 1991 Director: David Cronenberg Starring: Peter Weller, Judy Davis and Ian Holm In a career dedicated to seeing the unseeable and filming the unfilmable, perhaps only David Cronenberg could really do justice to William S. Burroughs’ controversial novel, Naked Lunch. Weaving together elements of Burroughs’ own remarkable biography with the content of the book, Cronenberg’s film steps inside the body and mind of an author to depict the dangerous act of imagination itself from the inside out. William Lee (Peter Weller) makes ends meet as an exterminator. But when he and his wife Joan (Judy Davis) discover the hallucinatory properties of the powder he uses to kill bugs, they become hooked, and their world is changed forever. Insects speak, typewriters mutate and talk, interdimensional beings reveal themselves, identities fracture and blur; nothing and no one is quite what it seems. When Bill, under the influence of drugs, or the bugs that have begun talking to him, shoots his wife, he flees to Interzone, at once a place and a state of mind, where things only get stranger.+Short Film: TONY AND BILL (5 mins, directed by Chris O'Neill). This is a remake of the 1972 film BILL AND TONY. William S Burroughs and Antony Balch appeared in the original, Rachael Scott and Colette Forde appear in this reimagining. This short film will support NAKED LUNCH. “For those up to the dare, it's one clammily compelling movie.” News Week
Read more
Read less