Film Review: Crimes of the Future
David Cronenberg returns with the funny, beguilingly provOcative Crimes of the Future
Body is reality. Surgery is the new sex. David Cronenberg’s first feature in eight long years acts as a furtive peek into a carefully crafted, crumbling dystopia. In a world where graphic surgeries are the only form of entertainment remaining, Crimes of the Future explores — with a demure thoughtfulness — the complexities of art and performance in an increasingly uninhabitable society. Come for Cronenberg’s body horror resurgent, stay for the perfect weirdo performances from Viggo Mortenson, Lea Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart. Minor spoilers ahead…
Like festering, techno-organic growths from one of his stories, the ideas behind Crimes of the Future have been gestating in David Cronenberg’s mind for decades. With a title plucked wholesale from his dialogue-free peculiarity in 1970, this new Crimes of the Future shares almost nothing in common with its predecessor, save for a singular throughline muttered over 50 years ago to echo through Cronenberg’s entire grotesque filmography: “There must evolve a novel sexuality for a new species of man.” Scintillating collisions of biology and technology, symbiotic perversions, and boundary-pushing transmogrifications are all tenets of Cronenberg’s specific brand of provocation, but it’s been eight years since the director’s last film, and it hasn’t been since 1999’s eXistenZ that Cronenberg has revisited his celebrated well of sci-fi body horror. But Crimes of the Future once again tells the tale of technological transformation pushing what it means to be human; jettisoning the old sex for the new flesh at the crossroads of pain and pleasure, expression and artifice, Cronenberg’s latest is one of the best - and funniest - movies about art in recent memory.
David Cronenberg is Hollywood’s resident maestro of sicko entertainment, so every new project is always baked with frenzied anticipation of another gnarly, shocking carnival. Crimes of the Future is no exception. From its much-hyped “surgery is the new sex” tagline delivered by a twitchy Kristen Stewart, to accounts of multiple walkouts from its Cannes premiere, Crimes worked a fever pitch over what twisted delights might lay in wait. So it’s fascinating to report that the movie isn’t the festival of surgical gore everyone was expecting, and neither is it the trafficker of transgressive perversion à la Crash. Instead, Crimes of the Future is most likely Cronenberg’s lightest work: an introspective rummaging of his own subconscious and his complex feelings about art and performance in a crumbling world. Sure, there’s sex, there’s surgery, and there’s Carol Spier’s signature fleshy apparati, but the true pleasures of the film lie elsewhere.
“Like festering, techno-organic growths from one of his stories, the ideas behind Crimes of the Future have been gestating in David Cronenberg’s mind for decades.”
In the near future, a declining society houses a humanity that has evolved past pain. Rampant mutations have sprouted in humans as a response to an increasingly uninhabitable world, and amateur surgery has become an art form and a proxy for intimacy. Modification and transformation are treated as avant-garde performance, and spectators gather to witness this macabre theater that has become one of the only modes of entertainment remaining. Saul (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux) are masters of the craft, art world superstars that benefit from Saul’s condition of “accelerated evolution syndrome,” a disorder that constantly forces him to grow vestigial organs. It’s a disease that causes Saul discomfort and severe digestive problems, but his act with Caprice - which finds him supine on an otherworldly operating table as she carves the extraneous organs out of his open torso - is a bonafide barnburner. As Caprice explains, their act repurposes Saul’s rebellious biology into an art form they control. And like every great artist, they fear the dimming of their creative spark.
My screening also saw a few walkouts, which I can only assume were due to the film’s opacity rather than its violence. With intricate rungs of world-building and conspiracy, Crimes of the Future rarely holds your hand as it peels back the layers of its dystopia: Multiple post-apocalyptic factions are slowly introduced to paint a murky portrait of the human response to environmental decay. The film begins with its most stomach-churning scene, a harrowing depiction of filicide in which a mother smothers her plastic-chomping child to death with a pillow. The boy’s body is left to be found by his father, Lang (Scott Speedman), a member of a cult of mutants that have evolved to subsist only on inorganic materials. In opposition to this group of evolutionary zealots? The government’s “New Vice” biocrime division, looking to quash the nascent ideology of Lang’s fringe element. Also swirling around is a duo of pencil pushers in the National Organ Registry, Wippet (Don McKellar) and Timlin (a sublime Kristen Stewart), who are tasked with cataloguing all the weird new organs that have popped up along humanity’s new course of evolution. As these disparate groups begin to bleed into one another, Saul is caught in the middle and he begins to question his identity and his art. With conflict that has undoubtedy also clanged around Cronenberg’s own head, Crimes of the Future interrogates the artist’s paradox: Saul grapples with the epiphany that his distaste for change - his constant pruning of the new organs sprouting from his body - is preventing his happiness, but it’s also the thing that’s enabling his success as a performer.
“With intricate rungs of world-building and conspiracy, Crimes of the Future rarely holds your hand as it peels back the layers of its dystopia…”
While Crimes of the Future’s weighty ruminations take the front seat over its body horror elements, it’s still a Cronenberg joint at heart. Carol Spier, the director’s go-to production designer, returns to configure the film’s uncanny world. Its seaside location is dank and unwelcoming, as if moments from slipping under the tides; and the technology - ranging from surgical pods to comfort-dispensing chairs - are biomorphic cocoons with blobby, pulsating controls, engineered by an oft-naked pair of drill-wielding corporate assassins (Tanaya Beatty, Nadia Litz). Crimes is also the funniest Cronenberg has been in decades, marinating with a perfect maelstrom of weirdo performances. At one point, Saul installs a zipper onto his torso for easy-access to his menagerie of unnatural organs, and Caprice performs oral sex on his gaping orifice. Saul groans: “Don’t spill it.” The film’s most memorable scenes, however, belong to a transcendently unnerving Kristen Stewart, playing up her art world fan-girling over Saul as an apparent apotheosis of every critique lobbed at her early-career fidgetiness. It’s a deliberate choice - with daring and over-the-top affectations - that practically vibrates her character off the screen.
If you want to hold anything against Crimes of the Future, it might be the rare criticism that it’s too short. There’s a lot stuffed in the walls of its fleet, 107-minute runtime, and there’s an abrupt curtness to its closing moments, but boy is its final image a doozy. A compact meditation on human evolution and the parallel (or not-parallel) trajectory of art, Crimes asks the question: In a world where our bodies are rapidly changing to accommodate a hostile climate, what is organic and what is synthetic? What is performance? What is artifice? Crimes of the Future is an old master at work and in his element, painting with a familiar brush but saying something new. David Cronenberg comes full circle with one of his earliest ideas, but don’t call it a return to form - he never left.
