Cronenberg has made a career of brilliantly and unapologetically exploring darkness and disaffection with what feels like an unblinking gaze.

As much thought experiment as narrative film, it uses its minimalist story of a rich man’s slow limo ride across a traffic-jammed city as the barest possible foundation upon which to build an extended series of philosophical debates and armchair psychiatrist self-diagnosis around the protagonist’s various levels of isolation.

The staid format of a historical costume drama makes the perfect space for some of Cronenberg’s most subversive, penetrating and darkly comic work to date.

The film remains at once one of the finest gangster pictures of the new millennium and one of the more unsettling entries in Cronenberg’s CV.

As a nation, we cannot outrun the violence on which America was founded. It is inherent in our pop culture and our history books. With A History of Violence, David Cronenberg dares us to examine why we enjoy blood and gore so much.

Empathy for its addled protagonist makes Spider feel like a labor of love, an odd classification for a film steeped in such an unremitting pall of darkness

Underscores Cronenberg’s gifts as a futurist and his uncanny ability to wrestle with the dread inherent to the virility of modern living. But it also feels like the director exorcising the last bit of gross-out provocation that had become such a hallmark of his most infamous work.

For all the controversy, in the end this is one of the most poignant depictions of that most cinematic of feelings: alienation.

Unlike some other auteurs, David Cronenberg doesn’t typically develop long working relationships with lead actors, tending to cast for type and temperament and then moving on.

Burroughs’ novel presents a grotesque world of surreal terrors for Cronenberg to explore, though as ever the director confronts hellish visions with a deadpan calm that only enhances how unsettling they are.