The Fly

The Fly is the best film about illness ever made inside a genre, and it gets there by being a romance first.

The first forty minutes are two people being funny and smart at each other. Seth Brundle is a brilliant, socially underdeveloped man who owns one suit in multiple copies because choosing clothes wastes thinking time; Veronica Quaife is a journalist who is better at reading people than he is at reading anything. Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis were together at the time and it is all over the screen. By the time the teleporter works you care, which is the only reason the next hour functions.

Then Cronenberg does the thing nobody else does: he makes the deterioration gradual, legible and medically shaped. Brundle does not become a monster. He loses a fingernail. His back produces coarse hairs he keeps in a bathroom cabinet. He gets stronger and more arrogant and then he starts failing, and he narrates it himself with scientific interest because the one thing the disease does not take is his curiosity.

Chris Walas's effects are doing argument, not spectacle

The design works because each stage is plausibly the next one. Teeth come out, a jaw deforms, an ear comes away in his hand. Walas won the Oscar and deserved it, and the sequence where Brundle vomits enzyme onto a doughnut is more upsetting than anything in the index's goriest films because it is presented as eating.

The pregnancy is the hardest thing in it

Veronica's dream — the maggot birth — was cut from some early prints and is the film's clearest statement of what it is about. Cronenberg has said he was not thinking about AIDS and that the reading is the audience's; he has also said it is about ageing and death generally. Both can be true. The film is about a body that has been given a diagnosis and a partner who has to decide what to do with it.

For the same transformation played for laughs, Re-Animator; for the same body-as-subject with a cult attached, Videodrome.

The short answer: Brundle, now barely humanoid, tries to fuse himself with Veronica and their unborn child to dilute the insect genes. Stathis severs the pod cables with a shotgun; Brundle fuses with the telepod itself instead and emerges as a ruined hybrid of flesh and metal. It drags itself to Veronica and presses the shotgun barrel to its own head. She pulls the trigger, and the film cuts to black on her face.

What is Brundlefly?

A genetic fusion of Seth Brundle and a housefly, produced because the telepod's computer had no concept of two separate organisms and interpreted them as one. The film's key line is Brundle's own diagnosis: the computer did not know what to make of them, so it made them into one thing. The insect emerges gradually because the human genes are dominant at first and lose.

Why does Veronica kill him?

Because he asks. The creature cannot speak by then, so it takes the shotgun barrel, places it against its own head and looks at her. The film gives her no other option worth taking — there is no cure, no authority to call, and what is left is in pain. It is a mercy killing and the film stages it as one, which is why the last shot is her and not the body.

Is Veronica pregnant with Brundle's child?

Yes, conceived after the first teleportation, which is why the film will not tell her whether the child is human. Her dream of giving birth to a giant maggot is the fear rather than a fact, and the ending removes the question by removing the pregnancy's future — Brundle's final plan is to fuse with her and the child, and Stathis stops it.

What does the ending mean?

That there is no version of this where anybody is saved. Brundle's last act is an attempt to survive by absorbing the two people who love him, which is the disease thinking rather than the man. Veronica's last act is to end it. The film has spent ninety minutes making you like somebody and then requires you to want him dead, and it does not offer any comfort for having wanted it.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Viscera 092 is near the ceiling — only 3 works score higher. The effects are sustained, practical and escalating, and the film shows almost every stage.

Tone 020 is bleak — 54 works score lower. There is no cure, no reprieve and no survivor who is unharmed.

Era bias 016 is deep analog, with only 28 works lower. 1986 film stock, latex, animatronics, Howard Shore's orchestral score recorded live.

Pace 044 sits just on the dread side, with 61 works slower. The deterioration is the plot and it is paced like a diagnosis.

The threat at 035 leans supernatural, which reads oddly for a film with no supernatural element — the axis is measuring that the thing destroying Brundle cannot be reasoned with. It is a process, not a person.

Reality anchor 036 is grounded — 23 works score lower. A loft, a lab, a magazine office, a hospital.

On jump scares: almost none. The film never surprises you; it shows you what is coming and then shows it to you.