Attend a major film festival as a member of the press and you’ll bear witness to an array of small selfish acts. After leaving loved ones behind, seemingly reasonable adults act like starved elementary school students attending their last supper; cutting in line becomes second nature, and to those with the most perfectly placed friends go the spoils.

Elegiac passages from Paul Éluard’s Liberté haunt David Cronenberg’s nutty Maps to the Stars, as if the Surrealist writer’s transformative prose was another of the film’s many ghostly manifestations. In a film that deftly normalizes the toxic repetition of pop culture references and celebrity name-dropping, Éluard’s dreamy influence feels alien, like an extraterrestrial marking imprinted upon an earthly idol.