The latest film hews closely to its source. The epigraph to both book and film is a phrase from Zbigniew Herbert’s poem ‘Report from a Besieged City’ – ‘a rat became the unit of currency’. In the New York setting of this film, speculation and valuation are defining qualities, and there is a sense of extreme wealth and simmering resentment and violence on the edges of the frame.

The central character is a young man called Eric Packer, a twenty-eight-year-old billionaire currency speculator who appears to be succumbing to, even actively pursuing, a deep crisis in his finances and his life. The events take place over the course of a Ulyssean day and night. The principal location is Eric’s car, which serves as office, lounge room, bedroom, and means of transport – not to mention a refuge, a bubble, even a kind of space ship. It is a white stretch limousine. Eric has had his car ‘prousted’, or lined with cork, in a search for silence. It does not work, but gesture and symbol count for a great deal in Eric’s world.

Rumour and unconfirmed report are in the air. The city is in gridlock, partly because the president is in town, but also because of the funeral procession of a well-known rapper. Eric is undeterred: he wants a haircut and insists on crossing town. He seems to be seeking a real, scissor-wielding barber (‘haircut’ is also a slang term in the finance world, referring to price differences or value reductions).

The point is, finally, that Eric is in search of self-destruction, whether by taking a beating on the market or by embracing the possibility that he is being stalked by someone who wants to kill him. The two passages of ‘confessions’ from this character are one of the elements from the novel that Cronenberg changes, in order to create a confrontation that brings the movie to an inconclusive end.

 Eric has a procession of visitors: guest spots from the likes of Juliette Binoche, Samantha Morton, and Jay Baruchel. There are meetings, encounters, transactions, speculations (in every sense of the word); there is sex, and there are internal medical examinations. Every so often he leaves the car. He runs into his wife of a few weeks (Sarah Gadon) at a bookshop. She is, unlikely though it sounds, a fabulously rich poet. They are as politely remote as participants in an arranged marriage, simulating what they understand is normal behaviour. Meanwhile crowds and demonstrators gather and vent their anger on the limousine, which starts to wear the scars of spray-paint and rage.

Cronenberg had cast Colin Farrell as Eric, but the actor chose to play the Arnold Schwarzenegger role in a remake of Total Recall (which, as it happens, Cronenberg had passed on directing). Farrell, at thirty-six, could be said to be a little old for Eric: Robert Pattinson, at twenty-six, is far closer. But would Farrell have made a difference to the film? He is a more dynamic, physically assertive actor; Pattinson has a more recessive air. There is no obvious reason to attribute the film’s problems to his presence, however. Other far more experienced and versatile performers flounder a little in the set-pieces.

Cosmopolis the novel is a brief, dense work, little more than a novella; in some ways it feels like a prose poem, a choral work of a particular, idiosyncratic kind, a narrative that also feels like the projection of a psyche. DeLillo is an insistently witty writer, and the aphorisms and utterances of his characters carry an ambiguous charge, often floating somewhere between Kafka and a desk calendar. His dialogue, particularly in Cosmopolis, can have a certain disembodied quality: it is both stylised and naturalistic, lyrical and mechanical. Cronenberg draws repeatedly on it, but in the mouths of actors, rather than on the page, it weighs a little heavily. There is no doubt that the director has deliberately opted for artifice, for hollow auditory effects and back-projections of city streets that look theatrical and unnatural – but it is a decision that leaves the film itself feeling weirdly ‘prousted’, drained of air and sound and life.