“Even someone who ought to know better, like Martin Scorsese, was terrified to meet me,” David Cronenberg once noted. “He said afterwards he expected me to be a maniac.” Scorsese himself went even further: “I expected someone who looked like Renfield in Dracula, slobbering for juicy flies. The man who showed up in my apartment looked like a gynaecologist from Beverly Hills.” It seemed that for Scorsese, there were certain expectations that came, not just with a Cronenberg film, but with the man himself.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising, given the Canadian filmmaker’s singular position in the collective cinematic psyche as the pre-eminent philosopher of aberrant behaviour, parasitism, and revolutions of the flesh. Said expectations have attached themselves to his latest masterwork Crimes of the Future (2022), cited as a return to the realms of body horror with which he made his name. It’s a term the director has long disavowed, preferring to think of his work as “body-conscious,” less easily ringfenced by the impulses of categorisation.

Such labels are not just reductive, they often miss the wood for the trees. Crimes of the Future certainly trades in insurrections of the body, but like so much of Cronenberg’s work, it’s also a classical romance at heart. If you look closely, the romantic outlook has been there from the very beginning, present from the tragedies of Rabid (1977) and Scanners (1981) to the drug-addled delirium of Naked Lunch (1991). “Each movie is a weird love affair,” he says, “or even, up front, a normal love affair.” Romance lurks beneath the vagaries of the flesh in the films of David Cronenberg, but you might have to adopt the parasite’s perspective to find it.