David Cronenberg, God love him, sounded content with retirement in a recent interview with the Globe and Mail. “If this is it for the so-called Cronenberg canon, then so be it. You can’t worry about legacy” is more or less the most definitive one can get, but it wasn’t for lack of trying — and if he’s going to the well a little bit in getting something new made, so be it. The best shot-reverse dynamic can’t direct itself.

Presenting the 4K Crash restoration at Montreal’s Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Cronenberg announced he was at work on a Netflix mini-series adaptation of Consumed, his 2014 novel about a camera-obsessed couple who discover a North Korean plot at world domination centered on planting bugs in women’s breasts… something like that. I wrote about it in 2014 and was a bit nonplussed by the whole endeavor, finding it maybe not the greatest use of his time but nevertheless a fascinating window into Cronenberg’s visual processing of the world around him. It sometimes played like the template for a more expansive, stimulating project, and, well, here we are. [World of Reel]

For a preview of what Consumed may hold, I highly recommend Cronenberg’s short The Nest, created in promotion of Consumed. A positively dread-inducing bit of work that, with luck, portends what’s next.

For posterity’s sake, the short and book’s official synopsis:

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