Cult filmmaker David Cronenberg is getting back behind the camera for the first time since 2014’s Maps to the Stars, with the director revealing to World of Reel that he is set to helm a limited series adaptation of his debut novel Consumed for streaming service Netflix.
The official Amazon description for Consumed, published in 2014, reads:
Stylish and camera-obsessed, Naomi and Nathan are lovers and competitors – nomadic freelancers in pursuit of sensation and depravity in the social media age, encountering each other only in airport hotels and browser windows.
Naomi finds herself drawn to the headlines surrounding Célestine and Aristide Arosteguy, Marxist philosophers and sexual libertines. Célestine has been found dead and mutilated in her Paris apartment. Aristide, suspected of the killing, has disappeared. Naomi sets off in pursuit, but the secrets she discovers are as seductive as they are disturbing.
Nathan, meanwhile, is in Budapest photographing the controversial work of an unlicensed surgeon named Zoltán Molnár. After sleeping with one of Molnár’s patients, Nathan contracts a rare STD called Roiphe’s. Nathan then travels to Toronto, determined to meet the man who identified the syndrome. Dr. Barry Roiphe, Nathan learns, now studies his own adult daughter, whose bizarre behaviour masks a devastating secret.
These parallel narratives become entwined in a gripping, dreamlike plot that involves geopolitics, 3-D printing, North Korea, the Cannes Film Festival, cancer, and, in an incredible number of varieties, sex.
A TV adaptation of Consumed was previously set up at AMC in 2017, with Cronenberg, Dave Erickson (Fear the Walking Dead) and Sheri Elwood (Lucifer) executive producing.