On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark honors fringe cinema in the streaming age with midnight movies from any moment in film history.
First, the BAIT: a weird genre pick, and why we’re exploring its specific niche right now. Then, the BITE: a spoiler-filled answer to the all-important question, “Is this old cult film actually worth recommending?”
The Bait: For Your (Further, Freakier) Consideration
There’s no better time than five days after the Oscars to revisit David Cronenberg’s scabrous Hollywood nightmare, “Maps to the Stars,” in which the Canadian filmmaker pitches Tinseltown as a mausoleum haunted by itself, and one in which we eat our own incestuous children.
Cronenberg’s first film shot in the U.S. is also one of his few to be truly dumped in the same country. After Julianne Moore won the Cannes Best Actress award in 2014 for playing the deluded, pill-swilling, desperately headed-to-pasture Golden Globe-winning actress Havana Segrand, Focus World handed “Maps to the Stars” a dead-quiet “qualifying release” at one American theater in Los Angeles (pour one out for Sundance’s Sundance 5, which became an AMC in 2017 before Landmark thankfully took over in 2023) for about five days. This fucked-up little number — which includes a schizophrenic burn victim played by Mia Wasikowska, Evan Bird as her miserable child star brother, and John Cusack and Olivia Williams as their horrifically awful parents — was all but scuttled into oblivion.
A later but still slight theatrical run, and cult play followed, including a recent run on Criterion Channel and upcoming showings this weekend at Lower Manhattan’s Metrograph. “Maps to the Stars” is written by Cronenberg’s friend Bruce Wagner, making this somewhat of a favor film given that the body horror impresario primarily writes his own scripts.
Author of nine books between 1991 and 2014, Wagner grew up on the fringes of Hollywood — working at bookstores, as a limo driver for celebrities from Orson Welles to Larry Flynt, an ambulance driver, a would-be actor, and a pencil-pusher at Paramount, where “Maps” got its genesis.
Havana is a Hollywood has-been living in the shadow of her dead mother, a Golden Age starlet whose brief life story is now becoming a movie in this “fictionalized” Los Angeles, where a then-alive Carrie Fisher just happens to be dropping in at the Chateau Marmont at the same time. Moore’s character is in a ruinous state, chasing this “plum” role that’s more than a bit too close to home. Then, there’s Agatha (Wasikowska) dropping into town seemingly from the sky to enact a grand plan involving her estranged family, self-help guru Stafford Weiss (Cusack), and her unctuous showbiz mom (Williams, making the case that Lady Macbeth really could’ve just used a damn cigarette). Then, there’s Robert Pattinson as the fame-mongering limo driver who drives Agatha to Havana in the Hollywood Hills, where she becomes the actress’ personal “chore whore.”
This sort of damaged demimonde is home sweet home for a director like Cronenberg, and his far from ethnographic plunge into the depths of Hollywood (where he has never made any of his films despite classics that received conspicuous play there) makes for one of his most wickedly entertaining movies. You can see the parallels to Lindsay Lohan, Kris Jenner, and Justin Bieber, and others — these would’ve been the reference points in 2014, and funny how they still mostly would be today — but “Maps to the Stars” is no satire. It’s a ghost play, an enormous gaping maw of a tragedy that by the end devours the entire ensemble in a hopeless void.
All that said, it’s a movie that I find deeply comforting! Now that you’ve had the chance to see it for the first time, Ali… thoughts? You said it “aged in a cool way,” which I loved, but I actually find the movie to be quite timeless in the sense that the star system has changed, but the brain-sick desperation of Hollywood remains the same. —RL
The Bite: “For a Disfigured Schizophrenic, You’ve Got This Town Pretty Wired”
Officially in the running for the most entitled sentence I’ll ever write, the 2026 Oscars was the first ceremony that, for me, felt routine. I’ve attended the past three years and, despite feeling a deep sense of investment in the outcomes, the ritual of arriving at the Dolby Theatre each spring has come to resemble my family’s annual holiday visit to church — albeit, with better dresses.
Watching Hollywood gaze into itself isn’t something I always have the stomach for, and when it comes to watching movies about movies, my appetite is especially finicky. Whether it’s a warm homage like Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans,” or a twisted midnight allegory like Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” reflections on fame have a tendency to feel out of touch. That’s true even when those films’ themes and motifs veer uncomfortably close to my daily life. (To wit, Rachel Sennott nailed “I Love LA.” So, I did not finish it.)
Screening “Maps to the Stars” under a new moon in Pisces, the word “narcissist” came to mind. It’s derived from the ancient myth of Narcissus: a story about a virile young man who falls in love with his own reflection. The tale warned the Greeks about the dangers of vanity. Neglecting himself to worship a projection, Narcissus isn’t so much struck down by the gods as he is lost to hopeless delusion.
More than a decade since Cronenberg’s ghostly satire hit Cannes, the entertainment business is still chock-full of narcissists. Bruce Wagner’s biting script makes “Maps to the Stars” feel even more ahead of its time — drawing out a cloying portrait of fading stardom that would look more social media-influenced today but is still recognizable as ever.
That said, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone working in the trenches of showbiz willing to argue that self-deception equals doom. If anything, many modern artists living in Los Angeles subsist on ill-advised hope for a future that everyday headlines suggest is less likely to come.
Benjie (Evan Bird) isn’t the best character in “Maps to the Stars,” but he does deliver my favorite line.
“For a disfigured schizophrenic, you’ve got this town pretty wired,” he says to his wonderful lunatic of a sister (Mia Wasikowska). Sure, beating Julianne Moore to death with her own Golden Globe was objectively “too far.” But when it comes to judging the lives of those most touched by egoism in Hollywood, few are blameless enough to cast the first statuette.
The appearance of the late Carrie Fisher as herself — speaking about the possibility of a famous daughter playing her own mother, something Billie Lourd already did in a flashback for the Star Wars universe — is intriguing. In a similar vein, Cronenberg directing a script about the echoes of grief in modern art sets up an interesting comparison with his much later horror movie “The Shrouds” (2024), which was explicitly inspired by the death of his late wife.
But more than those data points, when I say I think “Maps to the Stars” has aged well, I mean that its bleak, cyclical message of misplaced personal value rings all too true a decade later. When I speak to unknown actors who don’t watch many movies, I sort of get it. There’s something to be said about being the most “human” you can be and trusting those instincts. But when I encounter directors, screenwriters, and even fellow critics who resist knowing Hollywood history, I’m struck by the sense that they are missing an opportunity to hone their craft through clear-eyed context.
With the documentary world in a financial tailspin, and network news facing new threats under the FCC, movies about movies that once would’ve disgusted me suddenly feel like essential bursts of self-awareness. Is it crazy to admit I was a little bored at the Oscars this year? Maybe. But that reality — and cynicism like Cronenberg’s — keeps me sane. —AF
“Maps to the Stars ” is available for rent or purchase on VOD and plays at New York’s Metrograph over the weekend.
Read more installments of After Dark, IndieWire’s midnight movie rewatch club:
