- The Opposite is Connection: Will Poulter and Noah Centineo on “Union County” (August 14, 2026)
Towards the end of Rian Johnson’s “Wake Up Dead Man,” Josh O’Connor’s Judd Duplenticy says of his suffering congregation, “And some got their miracle. Not being cured or fixed, but finding the sustaining power to wake up every day and do what we’re here to do.” This celebration of finding strength through community to make steady steps toward healing and betterment is a key part of what gives director Adam Meeks’ “Union County” its inspiring staying power.
Meeks’ film lends tranquility to a story of recovery, a quality usually not afforded to films of a similar ilk. Will Poulter stars as Cody Parsons, someone who was recently incarcerated and, as part of his recovery, was assigned to a county-mandated drug court program in rural Ohio. Having wrestled with opioid addiction, the film bears witness to Cody’s struggle to get back on his feet, learning to live one day at a time, even while the fear of relapse and the presence of past demons actively war against him. His foster brother, Jack (Noah Centineo), is in the same program, whose own struggles with relapse mirror Cody’s own.
A unique fixture of “Union County” is the way it was so deeply created in collaboration with the community it depicts (the best comparison I can think of recently is Greg Kwedar’s “Sing Sing”). Meeks and his team made the film in partnership with participants in an adult recovery court program in Bellefontaine in 2025. The film features real court hearings and recovery meetings, with participants being given the option to opt out on any given day if they weren’t comfortable being filmed.
Meeks intended to be “observational” rather than “impositional,” and you feel that in his and cinematographer Stefan Weinberger’s approach to filming the participants here. There are frequent close-ups, but the camera delights in holding on to the visages of these people and asking us to hold on to their humanity.
Poulter and Centineo shared the screen in “Warfare,” an intense experience that solidified their camaraderie on- and off-screen and also had thematic synergy with their roles in Meeks’ film. In an interview with assistant editor Clint Worthington, “Warfare” co-director Ray Mendoza shared that “What separates good production units or military units is, when mistakes happen, it all goes back to preparation and training. How fast can you get back on track?” This mirrors, in many ways, the slow, steady, and non-linear path towards healing that these recovery programs celebrate. The mistakes and slip-ups matter less than being willing to get back on the wagon, reset, and try again.
Ahead of the film’s release, RogerEbert.com spoke with Poulter and Centineo about viewing the courtroom as a sanctuary and a chopping block, changing the Hollywood grammar when it comes to depicting stories about recovery and addiction, and the ways their roles as Cody and Jack are in conversation with past roles in “Our Hero, Balthazar,” and “Dopesick.”
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Both of your characters smoke quite a bit. No drag looks the same, and I’m fascinated by how your approach to smoking scenes has evolved throughout your career. How does working with a tactile prop like that, with its own rhythms, help you access your characters better?
Will Poulter: It’s interesting because my dad’s a medic, and one of his first questions to me after watching the film was “How many cigarettes did you smoke?” I was like, “Really? That’s your question?” (Laughs) It’s interesting because, with an action like smoking, my perspective is that it has to feel earned in some way, justified by a genuine element of the character, or be part of the culture they belong to; I wouldn’t want a character to do it arbitrarily.
I think of Noah and my experience on “Warfare,” and speaking to a lot of people with lived experience of serving in the military and a lot of the gentlemen that we were responsible for representing, smoking was something that was done as much to pass the time as anything else. I would assume it offered some form of stress relief, too, but often, as documented in the film, there were many idle moments when guys were just drinking tea and smoking cigarettes. Smoking was a way of feeling more proximate to the lived experience we all were simulating.
The cigarettes function in quite a different capacity in “Union County.” Smoking after meetings or after court hearings or after various elements of the recovery program was common, but there’s an almost deeper reverence for it. Obviously the folks in recovery are abstaining from substances, and so there are things that one can engage in without derailing the recovery process.
Noah Centineo: It’s about choosing which vice you’re comfortable with, if you will. Caffeine and nicotine … Those are the two common ones. If you can’t have other things, you’ll take those two. There’s something about having a prop like a cigarette that you’re able to see different people’s personalities come out. Everyone smokes differently, and you can see that in the campfire scene in particular.
Charles Melton mentioned that for “Her Private Hell,” Nicolas Winding Refn had him smoke more than 50 cigarettes in a single scene. I suppose that’s the record to beat.
WP: We may have him beat for the aforementioned campfire scene … we had to smoke a lot that day.
Photo: Leia Jospe.
When your director, Adam, stepped into the courtroom and witnessed participants go in for their check-in, it felt like a sanctuary. It was “a community of people seeking support, a handful of court employees there to help as best they could, and a pervasive feeling of empathy and the embracing of individual humanity.” I’m curious how that view, if it was communicated to you both during filming, informed the way you would operate and move in that space.
WP: Adam has an amazing way with words, and not only do I really connect with that idea, I think that’s consistent with what I observed as well. Adam often refers to this quote about sobriety from Johann Hari, who said: “The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, the opposite is connection.” What the courtroom kind of exemplifies is that idea that this is a place where folks find a sense of community, a sense of connection, and the support that folks feel in recovery is characterized by being around like-minded people who are also trying to get back on their feet and make better choices for themselves and those around them.
There is a sense of camaraderie, I think, that develops between both service providers and the participants of the program in that courtroom. I think one thing that is so beautiful about the program is that, unlike some of the more punitive and criminally weighted responses to folks who have substance abuse disorder, this is characterized by really humanizing people, taking the time to listen to people’s experiences, and finding out in a more holistic way what kind of possible support someone might need. That’s just a really beautiful response to a subject matter that is so heavily stigmatized.
People’s struggles are often responded to in a reductive way because our impressions of addiction are incredibly reductive and oversimplified. Noah got a chance to go out and spend some time and sit in on some court hearings about a year before the shooting, and it was invaluable to understanding why that is such a sanctuary, basically, how that is such a sacred space.
NC: It is very much a sanctuary for many, and it can also be a kind of chopping block.
You embody that sensibility in Jack so well, particularly in how you capture that character’s shiftiness and unease when being called up.
NC: Yeah, if you get questioned by the judge, bro, you’d be jittery. You get called up, kind of like confession, and you’re before this deity who is that all-powerful judge. If you’ve done well, atoned, done the right things, you get blessed, whether that is through receiving food stamps, bus passes, or credits. If you haven’t done well, you get punished. That’s not to say it is cruel or unusual by any means, but maybe it is further evidence that the courtroom could be a sanctuary.
Hollywood tends to over-sensationalize addiction, but there’s something about this that is so lo-fi, tender, and understated. What was rewarding about working on a story like this that operates at such a different register?
WP: It’s almost like two different sides of the same coin. One thing that I love about this film, and the reason that I really was drawn to it, was that it really challenged the stigma that is so asphyxiating when it comes to folks with substance use disorder. Within our industry, there is a responsibility to consider how we continually represent certain people and groups. Some of the stigma that exists around the subject of addiction has been proliferated by stereotypes on screen and the emphasis on negative stories when it comes to addiction. I love that “Union County” is, in many ways, a celebration of the progress and success that this program is achieving and of the participants who are committed to recovery.
This adult recovery program has a success rate of over 50%. There are 4,000 problem-solving courts across America. Many of them are focused on supporting folks with substance use disorder, but not all have this success rate.
I think the film, hopefully as much as anything else, will draw people’s attention to what the program in “Union County” is doing differently. Hopefully people will think differently when they do come into contact with someone who is experiencing addiction because I think that should encourage more grace and more empathy.
Will Poulter and Noah Centineo appear in Union County by Adam Meeks, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Stefan Weinberger.
You’re working to change the grammar of Hollywood films for these types of stories, which can prioritize sensationalism over reality. The film feels in conversation with both of your past works. Noah, I think about your role as Anthony in “Our Hero, Balthazar,” and how that character, in seeing someone like Balthazar struggle, exploits instead of offering aid. Will, your work in “Dopesick” had your character on the opposite side of the opioid crisis from Cody. Can you speak more to the gift of being able to embody roles that feel as though they’re echoes of each other in some fashion?
NC: I think that one of the central themes in “Union County” is trust. That’s a general theme in some way with “Our Hero, Balthazar.” Anthony doesn’t have Balthazar’s trust, but if you’re going to be someone’s life coach, if you’re going to try to help someone, you would hope that there’s a little piece of trust there. I think the only trust is between Anthony and Balthasar’s mother, but Anthony abuses it to make money. Whereas, as you said, in “Union County,” this trust is very different. It is the trust between Annette Deao and the participants in the program that, I think, ultimately drives the program’s over-50 % success rate.
At the very end of the scene, when Cody is in the car and he’s tempted to use, he gets that idea: “Maybe I should call Annette.” Even if his body might find more solace in the drugs, it’s the trust that actually moves his hand to the phone. That is something that is earned throughout the film that’s not there, and I think that is the reason why Annette has had success and why these programs, as Will mentioned, there are 4,000 of them around America. It’s through this rigorous accountability, from the system holding its participants to the participants holding themselves, that trust can blossom for everyone’s benefit.
WP: I’m glad Noah brought up trust because I couldn’t agree more. Yeah, “Dopesick” was such an interesting education for me in terms of the opioid epidemic, and also I think some of the challenges that are unique to opioid addiction in respect of recovery. I think our show was weighted more toward the injustices of that epidemic, the widespread devastation it inflicted on so many people, and how, in many ways, that damage was irreparable. The lingering questions that “Dopesick” touched upon in the final episode are: “What workable treatments are there? What sort of actionable responses are there to this epidemic in the interest of recovery?”
Adam Meeks’ short film “Union County” and this full-length feature are the story that answered that question. Here was this program that was very successful, was helping folks get back on his feet and was also mindful of the fact that at its core, remained mindful of the fact that no one wakes up and decides to become addicted to heroin, that there are long and complex journeys often characterized by a situation where someone may have been reliant on medication and they were prescribed oxycodone by a doctor. We heard that repeatedly in our time sitting in drug court and within the community. So I think “Dopesick” just helped me gain a sort of understanding of that kind of reality, and then I was able to approach “Union County” with a pre-baked awareness of that complexity, and ultimately end it with a semblance of hope.
“Union County” is in theaters now via Oscilloscope Laboratories.
- Locarno 2026: Objet A, Tear Gas, Fire Flower (Hanabi) (August 13, 2026)
In this first dispatch from Locarno is a trio of films one might call “elusive.” They all capture weighty, human subjects: sensuality, war, and disaster—with a visual and sonic approach that’s difficult to grasp and, sometimes, even harder to love. They are all formally provocative works, made to push the audience to its breaking point. Consequently, they’re like little I’ve seen this year, and I’m sure unlike anything I’ll watch in the coming months.
A sensual exploration of the body and senses, Ann Oren’s “Objet A” assuredly follows in the footsteps of her equally playful film “Piaffe,” a film about a woman foley artist whose surprising growth of a horse tail draws her into an S&M world.
Her latest is about two married star surgeons—Ingeborg (Aenne Schwarz) and Adam (Louis Hofmann)—who’ve risen to fame by using fungi to generate skin. In scenes that recall “Phantom Thread,” they share the same daily routine: Ingeborg prepares breakfast (boiling eggs and toasting bread) while Adam works out (he does stomach crunches and uses an exercise ball). They sit in their austere black suits reading the newspaper before heading to work, where they perform hand surgeries. With one patient, a mysterious Gaia (Simone Bucio), they remove a sixth finger growing from her fist.
Through a confluence of events—Ingeborg, a kleptomaniac, fractures her leg after stealing a gold lighter from a man, requiring her to use a steampunk stump—Gaia becomes part of the surgeons’ world. The creation of this throuple causes disarray in Ingeborg and Adam’s relationship, revealing their physical distance when it comes to their physical attraction.
See, Oren is greatly intrigued by how we express our sexual desires and gain sensual pleasure. Here, the surgeons rely on their senses: touch, smell, and feel—to arouse one another. But there’s no penetration or even kissing. By simply rubbing Adam’s collarbone, Ingeborg gains satisfaction. Upon Gaia’s arrival, however, they lose appeal for one another. Ingeborg takes to licking her leather-bound stump and flirting with Gaia, while Adam peruses a bar where a nun hangs out. The latter attraction opens the film to having a religious theme, recalling Adam and Eve, especially as Gaia begins introducing apples, moss, and even mushrooms (mostly for smelling and licking) into the couple’s home.
In the film’s most climactic scene, Ingeborg and Adam engage in a naked orgasmic fever dream led by a scene of the pair crawling through the woods and into one another’s psyches. Oren isn’t much for explanation or clear characterizations. Much like Peter Strickland, she makes evocations to the viewer’s desires and phobias throughout her films in a bid to elicit impulsive yet revealing reactions.
If some filmmakers want to make it clear that we’re watching a movie, for instance, then Oren makes it obvious that we’re watching human acts whose close relationships or sexual wants are only shown to be outlandish upon reflection. And while “Objet A,” like any of Oren’s works, could be accused of overt obliqueness, the sensorial craft on display, the committedness of the actors, and the provocative subject matter make Oren’s vision overwhelming and indelible.
The writer/director Uta Beria takes a decidedly political bent with his rebellious coming-of-age narrative “Tear Gas.” This is a harrowing film filled with nightmarish imagery and chilling sounds. It begins, almost fittingly, with a funeral. Avto (Gaga Shishinashvili) and his family are taking his deceased father to be buried over the Russian border. Avto, along with his 18-year-old daughter Elene (Taisia Eradze) and his stern mother Dali (Mzia Arabuli, “Crossing”), conversely, occupy Georgia. Like the solemn ceremony they are attending, their country and their family are on the verge of change.
Elene serves as the eyes to the oncoming upheaval. The green-haired teenager navigates the testy relationship between her parents—her father, Avto, is a cop, and her mother, Tina (Kato Kalatozishvili), is a reporter—with a similar dexterity required of her fellow citizens to work through a government that cracks down on civil disobedience via extralegal avenues. She also takes Judo classes that she doesn’t particularly care for as she regularly allows herself to be chokeheld to the point of passing out.
Like many around her, she feels as though she’s trapped in inaction. So when her grandmother and neighbors decide to attend a demonstration in Tbilisi, she does so with incredible eagerness. But when she arrives among the throng of protesters, she neither remains with her grandmother nor searches for her mother, who’s reporting on the demonstration. She instead becomes interested in a few defiant teens, particularly a young boy, who excite her.
In these protest scenes, which appear to explicate how several generations are united yet experiencing several different rebellious wants at once, Uta captures the frantic kineticism of protest. That’s because he filmed inside actual demonstrations, which grants his framing a kind of spontaneity around the many moving figures within this amorphous crowd. He also somehow grasps a poeticism, like when tear gas is thrown at Elene and her friends; Elene stumbles through the smoke as strobing lights and sounds of sirens invade the frame.
In another instance, her father Avto is silhouetted by the gas as he beats a demonstrator with his nightstick, making for a bold contrast between the oppressed and the oppressor. Uta bends these imaginative moments toward groundedness by including real archival footage of past demonstrations. The result is a double coming of age, so to speak, for a teenage girl and for a country.
Uta accomplishes this balance by sometimes cutting away from the protests for familiar beats—the locking of eyes between avarice teens—and to the search by Elene’s parents and grandmother to find her. Each actor approaches the fast-moving material with assuredness, which makes the somewhat broad ending somewhat disappointing (then again, I’m not sure how else Uta would’ve concluded this film). “Tear Gas” doesn’t necessarily offer a resounding rebellious chime in its closing minutes, but it does keenly say that the work is yet to be finished.
Of all the films I’ve watched at Locarno, the most impenetrable is Anna Vaz’s experimental essayist documentary “Fire Flower” (“Hanabi”). An adaptation of Yoko Hayasuke’s Journal of a Radioactive Brain, the film, which was assembled over the course of a decade, is a reaction to the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake that caused the Fukushima Daini Nuclear Power Plant to melt down. The stream-of-consciousness narrative oscillates between a meditative narrator describing their anxieties about radioactive elements in the food they consume, the air they breathe, and the ground they walk on, and interviews with different Japanese citizens who are equally worried by the toxicity (both political and physical) around them.
Vaz further scrambles the material via an aesthetic approach that’s as resistant as the wider society that refuses to accept that they’re living through the remaining consequences of the meltdown. It’s explained that many have instead called for “unity” and nationalism rather than allowing individuals to question the safety of their environment. Consequently, in the aforementioned interviews with her subjects, images of them speaking are matched with asynchronous sound, aurally demonstrating the disconnect between their truth and the accepted “reality.”
Like a journal, the narrative is further separated by dates doubling as chapters. Many of the early chapters draw out like a blade. At one point, Vaz evocatively films a sunset for a solid six minutes, allowing the reddish orange rays to envelope the screen. She wants us to sit with these images in a way that many of her countrymen will not sit with the possibility of the presence of radioactivity in Japan. As the film progresses, the chapters get shorter, almost mirroring the kind of erosion of memory often related to the aftermath of a disaster.
Finally, Vaz also wants to remind us that we’re watching a movie. She includes emails between herself and a source named K.A. (who provides videos and photos that could act as evidence) and between herself and Hayasuke. All of these components come together for a challenging watch because it cinematically actualizes fear and vulnerability of memory and awareness, particularly when it comes to the health of one’s body and mind. The film reaches for a knowing symbolism a tad too much in the summation of its many themes, sometimes even repeating itself beyond recognition. But Vaz’s single-mindedness to explore this subject in all its complexity brings one into her spell. We become subdued and lulled into a dream that more often than not lives as a nightmare.
- “Tires” Has Developed into One of Netflix’s Best Comedies in Season 3 (August 13, 2026)
In 2024, I wrote about Netflix’s surefire hit “Tires”: “I suspect the second season will be stronger as the writers hone the voice of this show and characters.” Because of content timing, we didn’t cover the sophomore outing, but it undeniably was, pushing the characters into more believable territory and adding the welcome comedic presence of Thomas Haden Church.
The third season, now on Netflix, takes the evolution of this incredibly watchable show to the next level, revealing that star Shane Gillis could be an interesting character actor in film someday by giving him relatable, funny arcs on a show built around his personality. In some of his better moments this season, I started to picture him in Alexander Payne or even Coen Brothers projects, and the thought made me smile. “Tires” still too often resorts to the easy (and arguably veers into offensive) joke, but it has gotten undeniably smarter and more nuanced with each season, reminding one why the workplace comedy remains such a tried-and-true format, especially when it’s populated by people who feel real.
The first season of “Tires” introduced viewers to the workers at an average Pennsylvania auto-repair shop: Manager Will (Steve Gerben), his cousin Shane (Shane Gillis), and mechanics Cal (Chris O’Connor) and Kilah (Kilah Fox). The show felt like little more than an extension of Gillis’ observational stand-up, complete with supporting characters and guest appearances from the same comedy sphere that he currently almost dominates (the only one from this world that’s arguably bigger is Nate Bargatze, who apparently has the cultural cache to open a theme park; I’d rather drink my way around Gillisland, for the record.)
Tires S3. (L to R) Stavros Halkias as Dave in Episode #302 of Tires S3. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026
Moving from what felt like a loose proof-of-concept six episodes in the first outing to 12 in the second, “Tires” developed its characters into something that felt significantly more three-dimensional, assisted by the new presence of Church as Shane’s dad, the owner of Valley Forge Automotive Center. Family, relationship, and business issues became a foundation for “Tires,” but it still often felt like a show that ran from anything that could be perceived as emotional or, God forbid, sentimental.
The third season still often has a habit of inserting a dick joke into a scene just as it’s starting to get serious, but Gillis is also willing to embrace relatable mid-life emotion more than he ever has before. His arc this season is that of a man who’s starting to worry that life has passed him by (Gillis himself is approaching 40), especially after he learns that an old flame is single again, leading him to wonder if he can have the love of which he always dreamed.
At the same time, Shane falls into bed with a younger character who calls him on his shit, someone saved in his phone as “Lucy the Lib,” a play on the political line that Gillis straddles as someone who’s clearly most popular in the largely Conservative sector of the comedy world but has always felt to me like someone most likely to poke fun at both sides of the aisle. Just the character of “Lucy the Lib” puts to bed the idea that this show can only embrace one political ideology as she’s never once portrayed as an object of mockery; if anything, Shane’s arc is one of a character who refuses to embrace what’s in front of him in favor of something that used to be, which could even be read as a criticism of people who want to turn back the clock to a time that wasn’t exactly great.
Tires S3. (L to R) Billy Magnussen as Taylor in Episode #305 of Tires S3. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026
Gillis is the highlight of season three, but the season is greatly enhanced by a supporting cast that’s also improved across the board. Gerben’s acting has improved every season, and it was smart to give the on-the-rise Stavros Halkias more to do this season as the co-star of “Bugonia” and “Tony” has become a quiet MVP for auteurs already. Add in some of the best comedy podcast stars like Dan Soder and Bobby Kelly in extended arcs, and you have a season that’s also the show’s strongest in terms of casting.
It’s been remarkable to watch the creators of “Tires” feel like they learned a lesson from each season, tightening what works and discarding what doesn’t from the year before. It’s already gone from an amusing experiment to a solid comedy in its own right, one that could appeal to fans of more than just its star’s stand-up. At this rate, before it ends, it could be one of the best shows on TV.
Whole season screened for review. Now on Netflix.
- Prophecy is Ragged and Dirty: David Cronenberg’s “Crash” Turns 30 (August 13, 2026)
On the rain-slicked streets of Toronto one evening, a trio makes their way through a 24/7 car wash. The woman in the backseat reveals her breast to the man sitting next to her. As the convertible car they have taken over to get cleaned closes up around them in anticipation of the wash, the driver, her husband, adjusts the rearview mirror to get a better view. The other man grabs the woman’s face, eventually thrusting his fingers into her vagina. The thrum of the soapy ribbons of the car wash and the pair’s strained noises are the only sounds. She pushes him away once, twice, but eventually stops. Once the man is done, the woman’s hand grabs the driver’s headrest—her fingers are covered in semen. The car exits the wash. The next day, her body is covered in bruises.
This is “Crash,” David Cronenberg’s chronicle of car crash fetishists. When it premiered at Cannes in 1996, the impact was immediate. One audience booed after a showing. The same daring that earned the contempt of that audience also earned the film a Special Jury Prize for its audacity. Because the protagonists can’t connect in any other way, it takes a grotesque offering to conjure it: metal, blood, and sweat.
Thirty years out, “Crash,” while still shocking, has earned a dedicated fanbase. It makes sense that people would resonate with a film where human connection feels dangerous in a world where we are increasingly losing our ability to connect. “Crash” isn’t the only film of Cronenberg’s that has felt somewhat prophetic in its assessment of human relationships. Across his career, the director has depicted the complexities of being human in visceral detail. In films like “Crash,” “The Fly,” “Videodrome,” and “Dead Ringers,” the Canadian director does not shy away from depicting the reality of relationships with other human beings as necessary, messy, and sometimes catastrophic.
“Crash,” in particular, approaches its main characters and their sexual exploits with an almost removed sense of non-judgment. At this point in Cronenberg’s filmography, bodily concerns have turned inward, examining the psychological warp that can make people’s minds as unfamiliar as any goopy mess of viscera throbbing onscreen. J.G. Ballard, the British author of the novel the film is based on, shares many of the same preoccupations with Cronenberg, and a name with the film’s protagonist. Ballard’s novels and short stories dive into anxieties about emergent technologies, psychosexual impulses, and dystopias with a removed, almost clinical voice.
James (James Spader) gets roped into the larger world of car crash fetishists after being in an accident that kills Helen Remington’s (Holly Hunter) husband, and he inevitably delves deeper into the group’s distinct dynamics. On its face, it’s an absurd and masochistic fetish. And yet, there is something distinctly human in the actions of the band of deviants, played with outstanding commitment by Spader, Deborah Kara Unger, Elias Koteas, Hunter, and Rosanna Arquette. It’s been proven that in the face of trauma, the human brain tries to heal through repetition, allowing ourselves a kind of control over what nearly destroyed us. We can see the group trying to reclaim control every time skin brushes up against steel.
The performances emphasize the group’s hunger for control, camaraderie, and release at any cost. Vaughn (Koteas) is the unofficial leader of this group, and at first maintains that their connection goes beyond each other. “It’s something we’re all intimately involved in: the reshaping of the human body by modern technology,” he explains to James at one point in the film. While Vaughn is a menacing force at times, Koteas gives him a soft-spoken voice and demeanor that masks something urgent and intense underneath. Similarly, Spader’s performance matches Koteas’ well as he follows along, with a curious kind of hunger that comes through in the smallest gesture, like a hungry glance.
The pair share a sex scene later on in the film that showcases their connection, and reverses how the film has established them as foils to each other: James is the dominant force here, while Vaughn takes a more submissive role. There is no dialogue, and the physicality of both Spader and Koteas communicates the vulnerability and bond they’ve developed over the course of the film. In a film like “Crash,” though, there is no room for sentimentality. Vaughn and James meet, have sex, and help each other learn about themselves—until Vaughn decides to take his own life by plunging into a passenger bus from a highway overpass. (Years before “Brokeback Mountain”; it’s hard to overstate how rare it was for the time period to see explicit gay sex on screen, especially with a star like Spader as a participant). The way their relationship plays out is emblematic of the necessary, brief, and often painful nature of any relationship—it all has to end, with a whimper or a high-speed collision. It’s only a matter of time.
That is not to say that there can’t be real romance or feeling behind the connections in Cronenberg’s films, even if it can feed our best and worst impulses. Indeed, one of his most outwardly brutal films (physically and emotionally) is also his most romantic. “The Fly” is a remake of the 1958 film of the same name that follows scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) and journalist Veronica “Ronnie” Quaife (Geena Davis) as they discover that the physical teleportation of living beings might be possible. Along the way, despite Brundle accidentally merging himself with a stray fly that flew into the wrong teleportation chamber, what starts as an infatuation at the beginning of the film turns into messy, real love. Brundle gets merged with the insect because he gives in to his worst impulses—he is jealous and drunk, and puts himself in a teleport pod to impress Ronnie after she leaves his apartment to settle things with her sleazy ex. As Brundle becomes more arrogant in his transformation, their relationship becomes strained—and, after some time apart, he calls her to come over.
Decomposing, gooey flesh sits on the face that once covered Ronnie in kisses. Ronnie doesn’t care, and Davis’ performance, embracing and listening to Brundle as he explains his plight, is moving. Every messy bit that happened before is gone, and she sees him and his humanity fully despite its rapid disappearance. A new kind of vulnerability emerges as Brundle explains his deterioration. With a beseeching look, he explains how his humanity is fading away: “I’m an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over… and the insect is awake.” Goldblum’s performance breaks through the pounds of makeup and prosthetics to communicate his pain and fear. “The Fly” posits connection as a powerful force that can make us lean into our most human instincts, for better or worse. Elsewhere in Cronenberg’s filmography, when connection is substituted or merged with technology, or created without boundaries, the results become truly catastrophic.
The connective tissue of technology can haunt the living as well as the dead. In “The Shrouds,” Vincent Cassel plays a sort of stand-in for the director, physically styled the same way and with a different connection to tech and the human body. Karsh (Cassel) is a man who, as one character puts it, “has made his career in bodies.” The creator of GraveTech, Karsh owns multiple cemeteries where people can keep watch over the decomposing remains of their loved ones thanks to the titular “shrouds” that stream the progress of decay 24/7. Screens on tombstones serve as windows into the afterlife (but of course, there’s an app for remote check-ins, too). For Karsh, it’s one of the ways he grieves for his late wife, Becca (Diane Kruger). He also stays in touch with his wife’s identical sister Terry, and uses a personal “AI” assistant made up to look like her (Kruger plays all three). One day, his Canadian location is vandalized, and he soon gets wrapped up in a number of potential conspiracies that involve foreign entities and espionage. Ultimately though, “The Shrouds” is more concerned with the personal consequences of grief; how trying to maintain connections to the dead via technology (much like how folks use AI bots to resurrect their loved ones for comfort) can make it nearly impossible to move forward in a healthy way.
Even in early films that are less technology-forward, connection is a key preoccupation. In “The Brood,” rage over divorce manifests as growth and a throbbing, external womb that gives birth to a destructive brood. “Scanners” treads a bit more into technology and the body, specifically how the repression of the body or mind can lead to violent radicalization. Among the plots about telepathy and repressive drugs, heads explode, and viscera fills the screen as the titular Scanners walk a tight line between rebellion and assimilation. Later period works, like “Crimes of the Future,” continue to be preoccupied with the repression and regulation of unusual bodies. The emergence of those who can grow extraneous organs leads to the development of a “National Organ Registry,” but also a subculture where sexuality takes on new tones and practices, like tonguing the wound of a lover and stimulating their internal organs.
Technology today offers us artificial connections with no real boundaries or friction, but in a film like “Dead Ringers,” it’s clear that codependent relationships that mirror the same dynamic can be equally destructive. Twin doctors Elliot and Beverly Mantle (Jeremy Irons) are essentially (emotionally) conjoined, to the point that Beverly’s romantic relationship with actor Claire Niveau (Geneviève Bujold) threatens to tear them apart. The brothers have shared everything throughout their lives. When they can’t share Claire, their relationship begins to fragment until they reach the point of mutual destruction. In “Dead Ringers,” relationships without boundaries can be just as harmful as the absence of meaningful connection.
The inability to connect and anxieties about media and what it’s doing to us emerge fully in “Videodrome.” The filmmaker’s most prescient film, and the one that fully articulates his ideas about sex, technology, and society, it suggests that the artificial connections and voyeurism technology provides us can seduce us into something much more terrifying. In the world that slimy TV producer Max Renn (James Woods) inhabits, stimulation for stimulation’s sake is the name of the game, as Debbie Harry’s Nikki states early on in the film. Watching Renn in the film’s final scene, ready to embrace the new flesh through suicide, it’s hard not to think about the people who have sought connections with AI chatbots in recent years and instead found oblivion. Nikki beckons Max through the CRT screen to join her in death, the one way they can be together and take down Videodrome, and he obliges.
Watching Cronenberg’s work feels like standing at the edge of a precipice. He shows us our realities, our futures, and our desires, even when they feel monstrous and impossible. Of course, the craftsmanship behind the bloody on-screen messes is its own, worthy spectacle, but it’s not the only focal point of his movies. The humanity, grotesque and vulnerable and sometimes all-too-familiar, is what really makes his films indispensable works of art. His characters and their inability to connect, or ability to connect too much, give us a mirror into our own feelings and anxieties, even when the reflection can be hard to stomach.
“Crash” understands the necessity and the messiness of human connections. In a world where governments are actively policing trans people and their bodies, where sex on screen is seen as something vulgar and unnecessary, where people with uteruses are robbed of their choice to be pregnant or not, his work feels not only relevant but necessary. The new trends towards a puritanical, near-sterile society in which differences are a blemish are more startling than anything the director has put onscreen. When milquetoast depictions of life that avoid its important messiness are dominant, it’s more important than ever to champion the visceral, the vile, and the grotesque.
- Memories of Helen: The Heroic Despair of “John Wick” (August 11, 2026)
I can’t get enough of John Wick. As soon as one of the films in the series showed up on a streaming platform (typically HBO Max), it became a default choice for me and my partner Judith, who adores them as much as I do. But it wasn’t until we were both crushed by the flu and decided to go to bed early and stay there till the next day that I figured out why this particular set of movies was so enchanting. All four were available, so Judith suggested we watch them all in order—a nine-hour commitment, not including breaks.
Seeing all four back-to-back showed me that star Keanu Reeves, director Chad Stahelski and the writers (mainly Derek Kolstad, who named the character after his maternal grandfather) deftly avoided many of the traps that befall sequels to hit action movies. One thing that helped is the compact time frame. The entire story takes place in about two weeks. The films feel continuous and maintain their momentum.
Only one other element is more important.
It’s not the “gun fu” fight scenes, which had the shock of the new in the original movie, and grew so elaborate as the franchise progressed that it felt like a lethal cousin of modern dance. It’s not the chases, although there are plenty, and they’re superb (my favorite is the chase around the Arc de Triomphe in the fourth film). It isn’t the neo-noir samurai gunslinger aesthetic. It’s not the world-building, which vividly catalogs the society of criminals Wick inhabits while leaving crucial information to the imagination (such as the task that John performed to earn his freedom).
No, what makes the John Wick series special is its heart. The movies add up to an epic modern gothic love story in which one of the lovers is dead.
The main characters are the retired hitman John and his late wife Helen, the woman he retired for. Helen is past-tense to the rest of the world but eternally present-tense for John. He regularly reinforces his feelings for her—freshens them up, you could say—through video, memories, fantasies, and dreams.
Some would describe this behavior as compulsive, perhaps a manifestation of “complicated grief” or “persistent complex bereavement disorder.” But that’s only because nine years separate the first and final installments. Moviegoers who saw each film independent of the others might understandably think, upon cueing up the final chapter, “This guy sure is hung up on his wife—it’s been nine years!” But in actuality, as noted earlier, it’s a short window. Part 2 starts right after the conclusion of Part 1 and ends with Wick killing an adversary on the hallowed ground of The Continental, being declared “excommunicado,” and having a bounty placed on his head. Part 3 starts one hour later, after the end of the “grace period” John was given, and follows him around the world until he’s finally “killed off” in a staged event; and Part 4 is set roughly six months after that.
But no matter how you experience the movies, the energy released by John’s inconsolable suffering flows through them all. It even flows through scenes he isn’t in, because John’s thresher-like movement through the ranks of professional assassins is always a central topic of conversation, and everyone knows what drives it: loss, mourning, and chivalrous impulse once directed at his beloved wife that now has no object, and must instead be focused on needful souls he encounters as he travels.
Reeves’ beautiful, haunted face bypasses contemporary, therapy-based notions of grief management. It connects instead to traditions of certain 18th and 19th-century English and American poems which depict grief not as a force that one must overcome, move past, or accept and incorporate into daily life, but as a rock that true romantics dash themselves against, again and again, until the rock breaks or they do.
Call it heroic despair, after the phrase defined by the 17th-century philosopher Julius Bahnsen. You know heroic despair when you see it. It powers the feats of heroes whose own dreams have been crushed but risk their own lives for others or complete a mission out of a sense of duty, often perishing in the process. (This is exactly what John does, in hopes of putting the broken pieces of the underworld back together.) Edgar Allan Poe’s elegies to his wife Virginia, who died at 24, exhibit a type of heroic despair that’s at risk of mutating into self-annihilation. These include “The Raven,” which we all know well; and Annabel Lee, whose narrator concludes that no force is strong enough to separate their souls and lies down beside his beloved in her tomb by the sea. (John’s reward is burial beside his wife, though in a regular graveyard rather than a tomb by the sea.)
The series also bears imprints of death- and loss-focused poems by John Keats (whose narrator in “Ode to a Nightingale” admits that “for many a time / I have been half in love with easeful Death”); John Donne, who reminded us for whom the bell tolls; Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who wrote 44 sonnets to her poet husband Robert, and whose short poem “Grief” might as well have been directed at John, who speaks 380 words across four films:: “Deep-hearted man, express / Grief for thy dead in silence like to death.”
The series is filled with mythological allusions, some purposeful, others incidental. The main character is a human monster who once killed other human monsters, turns good for love’s sake, loses his mate, and keeps having to travel back into a figurative Hell (the small-u underworld of criminals, run by the High Table) that he fought so hard to escape.
One of the strongest affinities is with the myth of Orpheus. A musician who was once a crewman on Jason’s boat The Argonaut, Orpheus descends to hell to rescue his beloved wife Eurydice, who fell into a viper pit while trying to escape a satyr. John doesn’t go to those extremes—if he had, the result might have echoed 2005’s “Constantine,” in which Reeves’ title character goes to Hell to save a psychic (Rachel Weisz) whose death is initially described as a suicide, but is revealed to be a sacrifice she made to prevent Lucifer’s son Mammon from ruling the world. John is trying to rescue not Helen herself, but the memory of Helen, from the oblivion of a world that moves constantly forward, forgetting all that came before. He does this by acting as archivist, caretaker, and storage unit for the memory of Helen. This resonates with another Reeves film, the 1995 dystopian sci-fi thriller “Johnny Mnemonic,” in which he plays a courier who stores confidential data in the part of his brain that once held his childhood memories.
The quest to preserve the memory of Helen, even as a meager set of disconnected moments, is not selfless. John gets something important out of it: fleeting moments of bliss. The only thing keeping him from turning one of his many fearsome weapons on himself is the fact that his years with Helen were so nourishing that even fragmented memories of their relationship make a violent life on the run a more attractive prospect than death, by his own hands or those of his would-be killers.
The saga begins with a story about a former hitman who found a love so great that it inspired him to start a new life, only to lose his beloved to cancer, and then seeks revenge against gangsters who stole his car and killed the puppy that was his wife’s parting gift. It’s understandable that it sometimes is summed up as a revenge saga, like “Kill Bill” or Sergio Leone’s Westerns. But the series is ultimately not about revenge at all—at least, not after the first one. And even there, you could make a case that revenge is merely the springboard that jumps us into the heart of the matter.
The heart of the matter is love. Sad, beautiful, never-ending love. The kind you rarely see depicted in English-language cinema (though it’s alive throughout Asia) but that fueled old poets who, despite different styles and goals, shared the belief that the agony of lost love was not a state to go into gently, but to rage against.
