The Terrifying Allure of Nonhuman Cinema

When the drama of human life is secondary to the plot

A still from Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color (2013)

Early in the pandemic I watched two films, one that I’d seen dozens of times before, and one new to me. David Cronenberg’s 1986 classic The Fly offers a fairly standard narrative arc: A scientist named Seth Brundle plays God and is punished. His secret invention, a teleportation machine which analyzes your…