David Cronenberg: All 21 Films Ranked From Worst To Best

5. The Fly

Cronenberg's biggest success. The Fly is the nearest that cinema has ever managed to get to balancing a truly dramatic love story and a deeply psychological body horror aesthetic. Its brilliance is down to three key elements: the most incredible makeup in any of Cronenberg's films, a script that is so perfectly weighted that it must have taken years to get right, and a lead performance from Jeff Goldblum that manages to be repulsive, heartbreaking and terrifying at the same time. A remake of sorts, based on the schlocky 1950s short story and film of the same name, Cronenberg takes a fairly silly B-movie narrative (man creates teleportation device, man inadvertently gets genetically fused with fly, man becomes monster) and makes it something utterly devastatingly human. Yes, Cronenberg uses a lot of the creepy bodily mutations and dissolutions that mark his other films (teeth falling out, heads contorting, fingernails being torn off), but the sign of a standalone film-maker is one that manages to provide a deep and meaningful story beneath the visuals. As Goldblum's character turns into the horrifying Brundlefly, becoming increasingly violent towards his beloved Veronica (Geena Davis, whose character falls pregnant and has disturbing visions of giving birth to a giant larvae), the audience sees his humanity drift away slowly and painfully. As the character states, in probably Cronenberg's most expertly crafted line ever, "I'm an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over... and the insect is awake." The final scene, in which Brundle goes completely insane and accidentally becomes hybridised with the machinery of the telepod, is one of the most powerful in all of cinema. Gorgeous film-making.