Film review: David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars

Even though he's been parlaying his cult horror appetite into more conventional features since 2005's A History of Violence, Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg has shunned Hollywood over his four-decade-plus career. And it was not until he finally spent a week there shooting Maps to the Stars that Tinseltown realised what it'd been getting away with.

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Your guide to the dark side in this showbiz satire is Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), a burns victim from Florida. After she befriends limousine chauffeur Jerome Fontana (Robert Pattinson) and is hired as a personal assistant to actress Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), Agatha tracks down shamanistic therapist Dr Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), his wife Christina (Olivia Williams) and their son, the 13-year-old superstar Benjie (Evan Bird), to revisit some very sinister secrets.

Instead of beating the dead horse that is Hollywood decadence, Cronenberg pushes his audiences off the deep end with his relentlessly nightmarish vision of the industry. The film doesn't only deal with the ugly appeal of drugs, sex and fame, but also revels in materials more befitting a Shakespearean tragedy: there's incest, death of children and a brutal murder.

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Along with its attempt to go into sociopathic overdrive, Maps to the Stars becomes a tragicomedy of extremes that relies heavily on its main actors' performances. Although Wasikowska strains to anchor the film the way Cronenberg regular Viggo Mortensen has recently accomplished, Moore is superb as a conflicted star who's equally haunted by the ghost of her legendary actress mother and her own diminishing draw as a performer.

Maps to the Stars opens on April 9