What are we supposed to make of Cosmopolis? It's the new film from David Cronenberg, which automatically gets one segment of the film-loving world excited, and it's also the new film starring Robert Pattinson, which gets a much bigger segment of the world in general excited. But from what we've seen so far it's pretty much nothing like what we've seen from either of them lately-- Cronenberg is coming off the stuffy period drama A Dangerous Method, Pattinson is coming off the Twilight franchise, and Cosmopolis looks absolutely nothing like either of them.
The first trailers have given us a pretty good sense of the movie's strangeness, but it gets even weirder when you watch a full-length clip, like this one below.
So, it looks like pretty much none of this is happening in a real world, as much as it may look like authentic New York. Everything that Pattinson and the mysterious woman say feels arch and strained, and I promise that's not just Pattinson's stiff Twilight acting coming forward-- that's deliberate writing to make everything feel a little unreal. It gets even weirder, of course, when the protesters holding rats enter the room, and though their chant sounds ominous when you first hear it-- "A spectre is haunting the world!'-- what does it actually mean? It's like Cronenberg, adapting Don DeLillo's novel, is deliberate picking words that sound powerful, but arranging them in a way that they're just slightly meaningless.
As inscrutable as Cosmopolis seems right now, it's also completely fascinating, and with the Cannes premiere coming in a few weeks we'll know soon if this oddball gamble has paid off. Let us know in the comments
