Crimes of the Future
Directed by David Cronenberg
Canada, 2022
David Cronenberg tried to boost his latest film by claiming that people would walk out during the first five minutes and stumble out of the theatre with panic attacks. With Crimes of the Future, the writer-director returns to the genre that made his name: body-horror. The film follows back to back psychological dramas – A History of Violence and Eastern Promises – both featuring Cronenberg’s muse, Viggo Mortensen, and he returns here. Cronenberg pictures have a tendency to split audiences and that was certainly the case for ReidsonFilm. A flawed film but a step-up from his previous work, introducing some genuinely thought-provoking ideas or … being blunt, a reheated stew of old hits?
At the core of the film is an interesting premise: Crimes of the Future is set, as it says on the tin, in the future. A future where infection and pain have largely been eliminated. We have two performance artists Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux), a former trauma surgeon. They are also lovers. Saul has Accelerated Evolution Syndrome, a condition that prompts his body to keep generating new but functionless organs. Their ‘performance’ involves Caprice slicing him open in a theatrical manner, and then excising the new organs in front of a hushed but excited audience. I suppose you could call it avant-garde.
In the modern age there is no need for sterilisation or anaesthesia. Presumably Caprice doesn’t even wash her hands … eeew! There are other self-mutilating and DIY surgery aficionados who ply their scalpels, carving and piercing, either in the privacy of their own home or for the voyeuristic public. Think late night Channel 5 TV (in the UK): they even have an ‘Inner Beauty Pageant’. Saul’s high turnover on the organ front gives him the edge however, and inevitably he’s become something of a celebrity.
This one comes with surround sound …
We are then introduced to a government department, the National Organ Registry. This is staffed by just two investigators, one of whom is played by Kristen Stewart. She is a fantastic actor but here her performance is so arch she almost backflips off the screen. A different take sees this as one of Cronenberg’s stylistic quirks. The pair have a vague role in overseeing all the slicing and dicing. Given contemporary society’s fascination with aesthetic surgery and body modification Cronenberg has a fertile field for exploration, particularly in looking at the performative aspects of the sawbones trade.
But rather than dig deeper he jumps via tenuous and often incoherent links to other side-stories. A parallel plot line relates to the degrading environment, a theme that was somewhat predictable given the post-apocalyptic Blade Runner-shabby chic of the set design. In fact after this thread gives the film its dramatic and tragic opening much of what follows is anticlimactic. A mother finds her son, Brecken, sitting on the bathroom floor chewing away at a plastic bin. His father has manipulated his own digestive system to allow him to consume plastic. He’s a radical who believes that “we have got to start feeding on our own industrial waste”. It looks like Brecken has inherited this ability through a genetic trait … or has he?
…and some of the ideas felt stitched together like a botched backstreet surgical procedure - C
Brecken’s father is busy mass-producing a Willy Wonka-type purple plastic candy bar that is fine if you have the guts for it but woe betide you if you don’t. He ends up getting murdered by a pair of corporate assassins disguised as boiler-suited technicians who actually look like characters from a children’s TV show. To add to all this we get another plot strand where Saul – dressed in a black cowl and mask, and channelling Aragorn hiding out in the Prancing Pony – is working as an undercover informant for the New Vice Unit.
There is far too much clunky exposition and the flat dialogue seems to match the acting, which largely takes place on a two-dimensional plane, veering too often into a sub-Bressonian self-parody.
Howard Shore (he of After Hours and Lord of the Rings) brings a score that is one of the film’s few saving graces. The music alternates between icy, ethereal electronica and a throbbing club-land beat and the sound design was particularly unsettling.
You get the feeling with Crimes of the Future that Cronenberg started out with a beguiling concept but struggled to take it any further. The level of detail and the design of the surgical procedures does impress, and as a piece of performance art itself maybe it works. But we’re not convinced those people were stumbling out of the theatre in a state of panic … rather a state of queezy boredom.
Reids’ Results (out of 100)
C - 66
T - 41
N - 50 (he’s back)
S - 49
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Coming next … The Music Room (1958)
