sydney’s review published on Letterboxd:
A full embrace of everything digital, absolutely beautiful with meticulous and impressive sound design. Dense with metaphor, full of hidden and not-hidden meanings and symbols. This journey through the breakdown of one abhorrent individual contains scattered breaths of life and compelling moments, but the endless monologues became increasingly dull. The cold and robotic performances are there to enhance the philosophical point, but this also makes it close to impossible to care what the characters believe. Paul Giamatti brings some desperately needed energy, but by the time he shows up in the third act, it's too late.
The nine other Cronenberg films I've seen each left me shaken and awed, but I couldn't connect with this one. Whose side is it on? Is the main character supposed to be evil? Should we sympathize with the destroyer or the destroyed? What truths, lies, fears, wisdom does it expose? How do the monologues presented affect our future, or our present? Is it a warning about money and power, a meditation on technology? The symbols are blatantly obvious (man drives through life oblivious to anything outside of his soundless padded cell, believes that purchasing the Rothko Chapel will somehow fill his empty soul, etc) but it just wasn't interesting enough for me to want to study it as much as I assume one has to to fully grasp the meanings. It is a brilliantly told story, and one that maybe I plain didn't understand, but I am not convinced that it was a story worth telling.