First Clip From Cronenberg's Cosmopolis Amps Up The Weirdness

What are we supposed to make of Cosmopolis? It's the new film from David Cronenberg, which automatically gets one segment of the film-loving world excited, and it's also the new film starring Robert Pattinson, which gets a much bigger segment of the world in general excited. But from what we've seen so far it's pretty much nothing like what we've seen from either of them lately-- Cronenberg is coming off the stuffy period drama A Dangerous Method, Pattinson is coming off the Twilight franchise, and Cosmopolis looks absolutely nothing like either of them.

The first trailers have given us a pretty good sense of the movie's strangeness, but it gets even weirder when you watch a full-length clip, like this one below.

So, it looks like pretty much none of this is happening in a real world, as much as it may look like authentic New York. Everything that Pattinson and the mysterious woman say feels arch and strained, and I promise that's not just Pattinson's stiff Twilight acting coming forward-- that's deliberate writing to make everything feel a little unreal. It gets even weirder, of course, when the protesters holding rats enter the room, and though their chant sounds ominous when you first hear it-- "A spectre is haunting the world!'-- what does it actually mean? It's like Cronenberg, adapting Don DeLillo's novel, is deliberate picking words that sound powerful, but arranging them in a way that they're just slightly meaningless.

As inscrutable as Cosmopolis seems right now, it's also completely fascinating, and with the Cannes premiere coming in a few weeks we'll know soon if this oddball gamble has paid off. Let us know in the comments

Katey Rich

Staff Writer at CinemaBlend