Naked Lunch

1991 • 115 minutes

About this movie

In a career dedicated to seeing the unseeable and filming the unfilmable, perhaps only David Cronenberg could really do justice to William S. Burroughs' controversial novel, Naked Lunch. Weaving together elements of Burroughs' own remarkable biography with the content of the book, Cronenberg's film steps inside the body and mind of an author to depict the dangerous act of imagination itself from the inside out. Former junkie William Lee (Peter Weller, Robocop) makes ends meet as an exterminator. But when he and his wife Joan (Judy Davis, Barton Fink) 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; nothing and no one is quite what it seems. When Bill, under the influence of drugs, or the bugs that have begun talking to him, shoots his wife, he flees to Interzone, at once a place and a state of mind, where things only get stranger. Winner of Best Picture, Best Direction, and Best Screenplay at the 1992 Genie Awards and featuring an astonishing score by Howard Shore (Videodrome), Naked Lunch is provocative, transgressive, and surreal - a feast for the senses, where nothing is true and everything is permitted.