David Cronenberg is a director who built his name on grotesque metamorphoses—men turning into flies, stomachs becoming VHS players, twin gynecologists unraveling like a bad dream inside a uterus-shaped snow globe. So when he got the keys to M. Butterfly—a tale of forbidden love, Cold War espionage, and the grand illusion of gender—you’d expect something with bite. Instead, what we get is a film so limp, so dramatically neutered, it makes Dead Ringers look like Fast & Furious 12: Tokyo Gynecology.
Based on the Tony Award-winning play by David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly tells the “true-ish” story of French diplomat René Gallimard (Jeremy Irons, back for another joyless ride) who falls in love with Chinese opera performer Song Liling (John Lone), unaware that his lover is not only a man but also a spy working for the Chinese government. The film unfolds as a slow-burning meditation on self-deception, colonialist fantasies, and sexual identity. Unfortunately, Cronenberg directs it like he’s allergic to passion.
Let’s start with the casting. Jeremy Irons—one of cinema’s finest purveyors of guilt, repression, and aristocratic constipation—is a natural fit for Gallimard, a man so naïve he could trip over a red flag and still blame the rug. But Irons sleepwalks through the film like he’s still haunted by the script from Dead Ringers. He’s emotionally bottled up, yes, but the bottle has no fizz, no pressure. He gives us a portrait of repression, but not obsession. This is a man who’s supposed to throw away his career, his country, and eventually his sanity for love… but he plays it like he’s making a difficult choice between two salad dressings.
John Lone fares better as Song—at least at first. His portrayal of the enigmatic opera star is intriguing, seductive, and just slippery enough to make the deception plausible. But once the reveal happens—yes, he’s a he, and yes, Gallimard never saw him naked over twenty years of “intimacy”—the performance loses its mystique and settles into low-grade melodrama. It’s hard to buy Song as a master manipulator when half the time he looks like he’s trying to remember where he left his contact lenses.
And here’s where the movie collapses in on itself like a sad soufflé. The core emotional arc is based on a lie so enormous it requires absolute belief in Gallimard’s delusion. But Cronenberg, ever the clinical observer, seems too detached to make us believe anyone would fall for this. He doesn’t probe Gallimard’s psyche so much as observe it under glass. The result is a love story with no heat, no tension, and no chemistry. It’s a romance between a man and his own fantasy, but Cronenberg forgets to make that fantasy seductive.
Which is a shame, because M. Butterfly should be crackling with contradiction and erotic tension. It’s about desire twisted by cultural bias, sexuality refracted through performance, and the way fantasy can override fact. Instead, the film treats sex like a dangerous allergen—never seen, barely mentioned, and handled with latex gloves. The most sensual moment involves tea and polite conversation. This is a film about a torrid affair that’s terrified of physical contact.
The cinematography doesn’t help. Cronenberg paints 1960s China and France with all the visual flair of a PBS docudrama. The lighting is flat, the sets feel rented, and even the opera sequences lack grandeur. There’s no sweep, no scale, no seduction. Interzone was more inviting than this version of Beijing. The political intrigue is given about as much attention as background noise—something you hear vaguely behind the clink of wine glasses and the slow drip of self-delusion.
The pacing? Glacial. You can feel your bones calcifying between scenes. It’s like watching a high school production of Madame Butterfly staged entirely in whispers and slow, painful pauses. By the time Gallimard starts wearing makeup and a kimono in prison while quoting Puccini, it feels less like a tragic finale and more like an experimental theater piece you accidentally wandered into because the bathroom was occupied.
What makes this worse is that there are real themes here—power, Orientalism, identity, betrayal. But Cronenberg handles them with the same delicacy he uses for brain tumors and exploding heads. Which is to say: none. He’s too restrained, too cold. It’s like handing a heart surgery to a taxidermist. The soul is missing. The flesh is preserved.
And that brings us back to the director. This is David Cronenberg trying to be respectable. No oozing appendages. No body horror. No metaphysical machines or warped science. Just drama. Human emotion. Tragedy. And Cronenberg handles that material like he’s afraid he might break it. It’s his most repressed film—and not in a good, thematic way. More in a “where did the director go?” way. The irony is almost painful: a movie about obsession and identity made by a filmmaker who refuses to show any.
Final Thoughts:
M. Butterfly is a limp, overly cautious adaptation of a bold, subversive play. Jeremy Irons is tragically underpowered. John Lone has nothing to do after the mask drops. The story of deception and delusion becomes a two-hour art-house yawn. Cronenberg tries to make it operatic but ends up with a monotone recital. It’s the cinematic equivalent of being catfished by a college syllabus.
Rating: 2 out of 5 powdered wigs.
A passionless tragedy dressed in arthouse clothing, directed by a master who left his scalpel at home. Long live the oldflesh, because this new stuff is putting us to sleep.
