Bill Lee is a part-time exterminator and full-time drug addict, who uses insecticides to get high, plunging into a nightmarish interzone of sinister cabals and giant talking bugs. Believing himself to be a government agent, he flees to a secret organization after accidentally killing his wife.

It’s hard to know where William S. Burroughs ends and David Cronenberg begins in this symbiotic adaptation of the former’s modernist masterwork. Spiralling into a world of Mugwumps and talking typewriters, Naked Lunch extends a hallucinatory invitation to the quicksands of the creative subconscious.