The
central problem of the picture has a lot to do with the
idea that Cronenberg has again taken a pre-existing script and reordered it along distinctly Cronenbergian lines — that what must have read initially as a sociological text on another facet of the immigrant experience (much like screenwriter Steve Knight's Dirty
Pretty Things) now plays like one of Cronenberg's investigations into the difficulty of parsing concepts like «normal» and «family» in the crushing crucible of bugs pretending to be human among humans.