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Maps to the Stars is, like all of Cronenberg’s films, at once edified and infantile. Characters recite Paul Elard’s poem “Liberte,” famous for being airdropped en masse on war-torn Paris, and the incestuous subplots hark back to Sophoclean tragedies. It may be the most vitriolic depiction of Hollywood since Michael Sarne’s ill-fated adaptation of Myra Breckinridge in 1970.

A picture that is almost certifiably insane can confuse viewers -- is the nut factor glossing over what might be wrong with it? No. Because, would I want it any other way? Of course not. Hollywood satires or explications seem only to work when the director removes the safety harness and dares to be impressionistic, ghoulish, batshit crazy (Sunset Blvd. and Barton Fink are prime examples) and Cronenberg (adapted by Bruce Wagner from his brilliant novel) goes there.

As collaborators, David Cronenberg and Bruce Wagner seem naturally suited; they share a rare ability to combine bleakness with humor... To say that Wagner deglamorizes the movie business is like saying that Upton Sinclair de-glamorized the meat-packing industry, and the medium of film allows Wagner to make his audience visualize (instead of merely imagine) the hallucinations that plague his characters.

The mannered dialogue of [Cosmopolis and Maps to the Stars]—by Don DeLillo and Bruce Wagner, respectively—is made to sound deliberately unnatural, almost like a sort of code. One can easily imagine the straightforward anti-Hollywood satire that most other filmmakers would have made out of Wagner's script. But by locking Wagner's language in their patented echo chamber, Cronenberg and company render it more provocative.

MAPS TO THE STARS is a consistently surprising, meticulously observed film, poignant at times, often hilarious... Missteps include an abundance of extraneous ghost sightings and a Greek tragic structure that is either not fleshed out enough or completely unnecessary. But overall, another important work from one of the greats.

Wagner's crude but strong metaphor of the price of incest, the mythological madness visited on violators by an avenging spirit of their own making, is worked out with reprocessed and familiar narrative details, but the banality of these details is masked, even overriden, by Cronenberg's controlled eye and sense of mood—his rendering of intimate violence with apocalyptic grandeur.

Surpassing Sunset Boulevard in its contempt, Maps may be the most doggedly desecratory and generally Hollywood-hostile movie made in Hollywood since the disastrous 1970 adaptation of Myra Breckinridge effectively terminated the career of its director Michael Sarne (the London-born child of Central European Jewish refugees). Cronenberg and Wagner are implacable in their joint jeremiad. Their Lala-land is a perpetual Night of the Living Dead, in broad daylight with palm trees.

It's certainly not a coincidence that Maps' parade of beyond-the-grave hallucinations takes place at the epicentre of popular illusionism, but the film doesn't do nearly as much as it could have with the idea of a haunted Hollywood. In lieu of something truly demonic, Cronenberg and Wagner have conjured up a wry poltergeist of a movie, one that's more obstreperous than scary.

By the time you get to the end, Cronenberg has pinned all his people against the screen like so many laboratory specimens, ripped off their scabs, and vivisected their longings: an old wound here, a long--deferred dream there. Still, the movie sticks with you. It's a fleeting nightmare that refuses to fade.

As a Canadian outsider, Cronenberg brings a cool distance to Wagner's vision of how Tinseltown's celebs and exploiters are too crazed to see how their hungers are consuming them; fire is the movie's purging force. Yet the doomed kids at the center of the film, the sweet, sick pyromaniac Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), newly released from a Florida psychiatric hospital, and her Bieber-esque movie-brat bro Benjie (Evan Bird), just out of rehab at 13, are portrayed with tenderness and compassion.

The director, David Cronenberg, creates a tony cheap-thrill atmosphere for damaged people on the make. The screenwriter, Bruce Wagner, piles on profane, portentous subplots as if clicking together dirty Lego bricks. The result is more oppressive than expressive—except for the actors, especially Moore.

Wagner's script hints at the existence of a kind of karmic telekinesis whereby... Essentially, it's the weaponization of fantasy—a genuinely fascinating moral idea, and also a deeply Cronenbergian one. I wish Maps to the Stars had spent more time in this queasy zone between sci-fi and psychological horror, and less in the by-now overfamiliar landscape of entertainment-industry satire, where the director seems both less original and less at home.