Check out this odd clip from David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

A spectre is haunting the world!

That could end up being the catchphrase of David Cronenberg’s COSMOPOLIS. Now, I’m only basing that on this new clip from the film, which you can watch below, but it already has the ring of something people will be saying if the movie is a hit.

The clip, which features Robert Pattinson and Sarah Gadon, displays a dream-like atmosphere that surely has a Cronenbergian touch. If a simple chat between two (married) people in a diner can feel so strangely foreboding, you can only imagine what’s in store for the rest of the film…

It is an April day in the year 2000 and an era is about to end — those booming times of market optimism when the culture boiled with money and corporations seemed more vital and influential than governments.

Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager at age twenty-eight, emerges from his penthouse triplex and settles into his lavishly customized white stretch limousine. On this day he is a man with two missions: to pursue a cataclysmic bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town.

His journey to the barbershop is a contemporary odyssey, funny and fast-moving. Stalled in traffic by a presidential motorcade, a music idol’s funeral and a violent political demonstration, Eric receives a string of visitors — his experts on security, technology, currency, finance and theory. Sometimes he leaves the car for sexual encounters and sometimes he doesn’t have to.

Cronenberg’s film is close to getting North American distribution courtesy of eOne. It will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival later this month.

Sarah Gadon