Naked Lunch

Naked Lunch

1991 · 115 min · EN · R · 7.0 (1,273 votes)
Dir. David Cronenberg · Starring Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Julian Sands, Roy Scheider, Monique Mercure · Music Howard Shore

“Exterminate all rational thought.”

CrimeDrama

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.

VIBE

This film is a descent into a surreal, nightmarish landscape of drug-induced paranoia and grotesque transformations. It's a disorienting slow-burn exploring altered reality, authorship, and identity through a distinct Cronenbergian lens. A bleak, hallucinatory journey for the adventurous viewer.

surrealnightmarishparanoidgrotesquedisorientingbleakslow-burnsurrealist body horrorCronenbergiandreamlike visualspractical effectsneo-noiraltered realityaddictionauthorshipidentityparanoia
based on novel or bookwritinghallucinationwriterbugillegal drugsexterminatorbeat generationgay theme
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