With Luca Guadagnino’s Queer released on December 13^th, we invite audiences to savour, perhaps for the first time, the unique flavour of David Cronenberg’s earlier adaptation of a William S. Burroughs novel, also featuring William Lee, the author’s alter-ego, played here by Peter Weller, on hiatus from Robocop duties. Lee, a former junkie, 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, and nothing and no one is quite what it seems.

Notes by David O’Mahony