The Fly

The most emotionally direct film Cronenberg made, and the effects are the least of it.

A scientist teleports himself, a housefly gets into the pod, and over the following weeks he comes apart. What makes it land on people who do not like body horror is that the film is structured as a relationship: Veronica watches somebody she loves deteriorate, is told repeatedly that he is fine, and eventually has to decide what to do about it.

Cronenberg has been consistent that he was not writing about AIDS, which is the reading everybody brought to it in 1986, and that he was writing about ageing and illness generally. Both readings work because the film never names the thing.

Chris Walas won the Academy Award for the makeup, which degrades across five distinct stages so gradually that you cannot point to where Seth stops being a person.

Goldblum plays the whole thing for real, including the parts where he is under a foot of latex.