Cosmopolis

Inspired by Don DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis, writer-director David Cronenberg crafts a drama about wealth, isolation and fear of mortality that is vigorously repulsive yet deeply compelling. Robert Pattinson willfully discards his teen dream persona playing depraved and self-destructive billionaire Eric Packer, who risks his fortune, marriage, and life while traversing Manhattan to get a simple haircut. Along the way, Packer has various encounters -- both of business and pleasure -- whatever their context, each becomes a fearsome confrontation that gives him only a brief exhilaration as the city throbs with class warfare around him. This bizarre offering dares Pattinson to be sleazy and vile, and he shoulders the role admirably. Supporting players Kevin Durand and Sarah Gadon -- who play his bodyguard and wife respectively -- are also sharp standouts amongst an incredible cast that all dig hungrily into Cronenberg's cold vivisection of the American zeitgeist that loathes yet craves affluence and excess. With flat delivery, languid physicality and jarring dialogue packed with rhetoric and incomprehensible business banter, the cast throws us into this world of the untouchable and enigmatic elite who floats among the vulgar, vibrant commoners of Manhattan. But through scene after scene of peculiar personal relationships, they steadily pull you into Cosmopolis' strange but seductive sway.