David Cronenberg Takes High Tech to the Graveyard
The proliferation of mysteries is unsettling—and exciting. Karsh has an active imagination, and so does Terry (Diane Kruger), Becca’s twin sister, who lives nearby. Terry is a former veterinarian turned pet groomer who lives her life perched on the edge of various rabbit holes, waiting for an excuse to dive in. Previously, she suspected that her sister had been the victim of a “doctors’ plot” (the nod toward Soviet psychiatry is deliberate). When Karsh asks her about the growths, her answer is succinct: “My money’s on tracking devices.”
Terry is a dead ringer for her sister, except that, as she says, her breasts are slightly bigger. You could cut the sexual tension between the in-laws with a scalpel, and Cronenberg triangulates the perversity by introducing Terry’s ex-husband, Maury (Guy Pearce), an IT specialist and freelance hacker who disappeared down his own private rabbit hole a long time ago. Now, he crouches there amid a warren of grudges and insecurities. Karsh and Maury regard each other tenderly as “brothers in sorrow” with identical taste in women. The contrast between Maury’s schlubby ensembles and Karsh’s sinuous fits serves as shorthand for their divergent fortunes and temperaments (Cassel’s costumes are by Saint Laurent, which also supplied financing for what was a low-budget production).
While Maury clicks around trying to figure out who’s targeting GraveTech, Karsh is wooed by a likely suspect: Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), the wife of an elderly and dying European industrialist determined to bring the shrouds to Budapest. Over a meal of “greasy Hungarian,” Soo-Min proves formidable and alluring: She explains that, because she’s blind, her other senses are heightened, a power play wrapped in a come-on. The other woman in Karsh’s ear—and also consistently on all of his screens, including his iPhone, his laptop, and his self-driving car’s GPS—is Hunny, an AI helper bot programmed by Maury (a gift from one brother in sorrow to another). Hunny looks like a Memoji version of Becca (and Terry); she acts like a flirtier version of Siri, or maybe a distaff HAL 9000. She’s also a shape-shifter, at one point transforming, unsolicited, into a yassified, bedroom-eyed CGI koala bear. Soo-Min is wary. “Don’t trust your avatar,” she says, flatly.