It seems that every director with a distinctive, challenging style eventually reigns in their impulses and makes a more conventional feature for a major studio.  Not too long after David Lynch surprised everybody with The Elephant Man, David Cronenberg made the Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone.  How strange to think both directors also turned down the opportunity to direct Return of the Jedi.  Imagine how that would have turned out under the direction of either auteur!

The Dead Zone finds Cronenberg stepping away from body horror, resulting in one of the most warmly human movies he has made to date.  Some of the best moments here are simply cutaways to one character watching two other characters interacting.  For a change, this is a film focused more on the interactions between humans instead of horrific things happening with their internal organs.  On the other hand, the source material is a King novel and we are talking Cronenberg, so there is some violence along with some restrained gore (really, just squibs emulating gunshot wounds). 

Where the real magic lies in the movie is in the underlying current of unease.  Christopher Walken expertly channels that feeling of lingering dread, portraying a teacher who awakens from a five-year coma to discover he has lost his fiancée and gained a horrible physic ability that, upon touching somebody’s hand, enables him to see their future, and even current but unknown events related to them.  Each of those scenes gives me a weird electric thrill, as Walken finds himself immersed into scenes he is witnessing.

The structure of the film (and the original novel) is peculiar in that it eschews the traditional three-act structure, and is instead roughly in two halves.  In the first half, a sheriff played by Tom Skerritt employs Walken to help investigate a serial killer in a small town, after the leads have dried up.  The second half is largely Walken trying to decide what to do about Martin Sheen’s presidential candidate, who poses a threat to the world if elected.

In addition to the aforementioned actors, the rest of the cast is excellent, with Brooke Adams and Herbert Lom delivering very solid performances. 

Here is one of those movies I could watch at any time.  There honestly isn’t anything about it I don’t like, and it is interesting to see Cronenberg do something with this much humanity in it.  Apparently, that warmth carried over into the entire production, as the gazebo that was constructed for the movie was built to code and then donated to the town for permanent use.  Because of insurance concerns, sets are usually torn down when a shoot wraps, but here was something extra done just as a gesture of thanks to the town.

Dir: David Cronenberg

Starring Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Martin Sheen, Herbert Lom

Watched on Shout Factory blu-ray