There’s always more than meets the eye when it comes to legendary director David Cronenberg. With his latest feature, Maps to the Stars, the Canadian filmmaker furthers his recent departure from the body horror/science-fiction that his filmography was founded on to examine the darker side of big-screen Hollywood aspirations, working off a script penned by Bruce Wagner. Continuing their collaboration that began with 2012’s Cosmopolis, Robert Pattinson is part of the eclectic cast, which also includes Julianne Moore, John Cusack, and Mia Wasikowska.

Maps to the Stars made its premiere at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, where Moore the award for Best Actress. The film went on to an immediate theatrical release in France before screening at this year’s Toronto Film Festival.

Critics have discussed the film’s passionate satire of the culture of Hollywood. As The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw put it: “It is twisted, twisty, and very far from all the predictable outsider platitudes about celebrity culture. The status-anxiety, fame-vertigo, sexual satiety and that all-encompassing fear of failure which poisons every triumph are displayed here with an icy new connoisseurship, a kind of extremism which faces down the traditional objection that films like this are secretly infatuated with their subject.”

The trailer below provides just a glimpse of Cronenberg's unpredictable new work:

NYFF Official Description:

David Cronenberg takes Bruce Wagner’s script—a pitch-black Hollywood satire—chills it down, and gives it a near-tragic spin. The terrible loneliness of narcissism afflicts every character from the fading star Havana (Julianne Moore, who won the Best Actress Award at Cannes for her nervy performance) to the available-for-anything chauffeur (Robert Pattinson) to the entire Weiss family, played by John Cusack, Olivia Williams, Evan Bird, and Mia Wasikowska. The last two are brother and sister, damaged beyond repair and fated to repeat the perverse union of their parents. And yet, in their murderous rages, they have the purity of avenging angels, taking revenge on a culture that needs to be put out of its misery—or so it must seem to them. Cronenberg’s visual strategy physically isolates the characters from one another, so that their occasional violent connections pack a double whammy. An eOne Films release.