Crimes of the Future (2022)
dir. David Cronenberg
Rated: R
image: ©2022 Neon
While it must have been personally frustrating for director David Cronenberg, the fact that it took almost 20 years for him to get his latest film, Crimes of the Future, onto the screen was probably for the best. Originally titled Painkillers, Cronenberg’s return to funky, disturbing body horror was first set to begin production in 2003, but the project stalled out until last year.
What he’s made feels like a snapshot of our current moment. I suspect Painkillers wouldn’t have captured the feel of its time, had it been released when initially planned. Crimes of the Future’s fidelity to our present malaise is probably due in part to the rewrites and revisions that undoubtedly took place in the interim between Cronenberg’s first draft and the start of production.
The striking first image of the film is of a massive luxury cruise ship. Once a symbol for opulent recreation (for those who could afford it), the cruise ship is now laying on its side near a beach, half submerged and dilapidated. We see at least one other capsized ship during Crimes of the Future. Cronenberg seems to be using the image as a representation for either climate catastrophe or societal collapse, most likely both.
The movie is set at some indeterminate point in the future. Humans have begun to evolve to not feel pain. In addition to that, some among the population are experiencing Accelerated Evolution Syndrome. They develop new organs that cause extreme discomfort, even as the traditional sensations of pain are muted or gone completely. The newest performance-art craze in this future involves shows where the new organs are surgically removed for a live audience and, of course, filmed for posterity. The old-fashioned CRT TV sets placed throughout the room during these performances harken back to one of Cronenberg’s best, Videodrome.
Saul Tenser and his assistant Caprice – they are also lovers – are two such performance artists. Saul grows these strange new organs and Caprice removes them using a set of surgical tools that she controls via a gushy organic remote. It looks a bit like an oversized slug; it’s a glob of slippery jelly with lights and buttons.
The tactile and uncomfortably organic nature of this remote control – and every other bit of technology in the picture – represents a return to form for Cronenberg not seen since the body horror maestro was at the height of his powers in the 1980s with films like the aforementioned Videodrome, The Fly, and Dead Ringers. His films A History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007) should not be discounted as important and well-crafted entries into Cronenberg’s filmography, but they are both largely missing the delightfully nauseating body horror motif. (I’ll admit, I haven’t seen eXistenZ or Spider, two of Cronenberg’s later works most likely to qualify for a similar comparison.)
There is a subplot in Crimes of the Future about a young boy whose own mother kills him because she is disturbed by her son’s ability and desire to eat plastic. Minutes before she suffocates the boy – whom she calls a monster – with a pillow, she sees him eating a plastic trash can; his saliva, which he lets ooze onto the trash can, seems to act like an acid, helping him to begin digestion before each bite.
The boy’s father, Lang, is part of a mysterious group who manufacture and consume what look like strange purple candy bars. After a call from his estranged wife, Lang picks up his son’s body. He wants Saul, a superstar in the surgical performance art world, to stage a show in which he performs an autopsy on the boy. Both Saul and Caprice are hesitant. They believe that their art requires enthusiastic consent. Since the boy is dead, he is incapable of giving that consent. Lang is interested in making a statement through the autopsy about the boy’s physiology, which is linked to those strange candy bars.
As viscerally disturbing as the surgery sequences are in Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg – who also wrote the screenplay – undercuts their effectiveness by insisting on having his characters verbalize themes that would have been much more compelling had they been left unspoken. During the first such sequence – in which Saul is moaning in either agony or ecstasy, or, more likely, both – I consciously thought to myself, “Surgery is the new sex in this future.” (I would have sworn I scribbled words to that effect in my notes, but checking them after the screening proved me wrong.)
Sure enough, in the aftermath of the show, Timlin, an investigator with the newly formed National Organ Registry – who, with her boss, Wippet, have taken an interest in Saul’s work – says out loud what was obvious from the masterfully shot previous scene. “Surgery is the new sex,” Timlin says to Saul as he lies prostrate on a couch, wiped out from the performance even as his audience celebrates all around him.
One of the fascinating things that Crimes does explore through showing as opposed to telling is the gender-swapped dynamic of Saul and Caprice’s relationship. Saul, because of his condition, is weak and, therefore, because of traditional sexist ideas about gender, feminized. The surgeries that Caprice performs on her partner are penetrative acts. He is helpless, lying on his back as Caprice’s instruments enter his body. The mix of pain and pleasure on his face as Caprice has her way with him is evocative of similar themes explored in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser series.
Viggo Mortensen delivers an odd and striking performance as Saul Tenser. Mortensen has worked with Cronenberg on three other occasions, appearing in A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, and A Dangerous Method. His Saul speaks barely above a whisper in halting phrases which are often interrupted by phlegmatic coughing or throat-clearing. Mortensen plays the character as a tortured man desperately looking for relief.
French actor Léa Seydoux plays Caprice with an ominous foreboding. She plays the character as someone uncomfortable with the direction her chosen artform is moving but who is so obsessed with its cathartic power that she is helpless to abandon it. It was impossible for me not to notice that the 79-year-old Cronenberg cast the 36-year-old Seydoux to play the creative and sexual partner opposite the 63-year-old Mortensen. That older-man-to-much-younger-woman trope in male-centered filmmaking is starting to feel like a relic of the past, but it’s clearly not going without a fight. Old dudes gonna old dude, I guess.
Kristen Stewart appears in a handful of scenes as Timlin, the National Organ Registry investigator who could lose her job for even attending one of Saul’s performances. (Cronenberg leaves vague exactly what’s legal and what isn’t about these performance art pieces within the world of the movie, which ultimately serves to make it more intriguing.) As much as I loved Stewart’s performance as Princess Diana in last year’s Spencer, I couldn’t quite get on board with her turn as Timlin. It’s too mannered, akin to Kiefer Sutherland’s capital “C” acting choices for his role in the 1998 sci-fi film Dark City. She seems to have wanted to crank the weird factor to 11; it comes off as distracting more than anything.
In this future dystopia, Saul tries to find relief, like we all do, with the latest modern conveniences. In this world, most of those conveniences come courtesy of Lifeformware, a company that makes smart furniture and other appliances meant to ease the discomfort of those suffering from Accelerated Evolution Syndrome. Whether it’s a bed that uses algorithms to move in anticipation of making the sleeper as comfortable as possible, or an eating chair that does the same to help with digestion, our culture’s ceaseless desire to let technology improve our lives is what Cronenberg is roasting. I ruefully giggled when Saul surmises that his malfunctioning womb-like bed needs a software update in order to perform properly once again. We’ve all been there, Saul.
Like the surgery remote control, Cronenberg’s visual effects team – and based on his other films, I have to imagine Cronenberg himself had a lot of input here – designed these futuristic items, like the bed and the eating chair, with an eerily human echo. The eating chair looks like it’s made of bones – the back looks like a spine, the arms resemble, well, arms – covered with a sickly yellow skin. It borders on silly, and in the hands of a lesser director, it might have been. Within Cronenberg’s creepy aesthetic, these items are haunting, weird, and a little unsettling.
For science enthusiasts, the movie’s fast and loose use of the concept of evolution might be infuriating. Like a lot of sci-fi, Crimes anthropomorphizes evolution. Within this world, evolution, according to one character, is revolting against humans because of our hubris in manipulating the natural order. As my wife said following the screening, “That’s not how any of that works.” Still, as an analogy for the relentless damage we’re doing to our environment and, ultimately, to ourselves, it works if you’re willing to let go of literal interpretations.
Crimes of the Future also works as pure sensory experience. One short expository sequence highlights this. Saul goes to an art show as an audience member and is approached by a woman who gives him information about a doctor interested in meeting him. The scene serves as a way to nudge the plot forward, but the art show, happening mostly in the background, is almost hallucinatory in its disturbing visuals.
The sequence begins with a tight close up of a man’s face. Someone is sowing his mouth shut. His eyes have likewise both been sown shut. I’m guessing the person playing this character is either a performance artist himself, or some extraordinary makeup effects were used, because we see the needle puncturing the flesh immediately above and below the man’s lips. As we see more of him, it’s apparent he has had ears surgically implanted in numerous places all over his body. After his mouth is shown shut, he begins dancing to industrial-sounding music emanating from speakers in the room.
The woman who approaches Saul makes an offhand remark to him about how the ears aren’t functional at all, they are merely an aesthetic affectation. That brought to mind the intriguing question of how more extreme body modification would become in a world where pain isn’t an issue.
If you’re able to get on Crimes of the Future’s weird and surrealistic wavelength, it holds powerful sights and sounds and disturbingly provocative ideas. It’s a fantasy that imagines the future of humanity.
None of us should be excited for that future to arrive.
Why it got 3.5 stars:
- Cronenberg is a little too obvious with a few of the points he’s trying to make, and some of the “science” is laughable, but damn he knows how to put together incredibly bracing imagery. This is a movie that rewards thinking deeply about how we got where we are, and what the future might look like if we don’t course correct soon.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- This is one of those hermetically sealed feeling movies, where you actively wonder what the rest of this world looks like. I suspect that has a lot to do with the budget Cronenberg had to work with, but he’s incredibly successful in building his almost claustrophobic vision. Everything, and I mean everything, in this world is run down, seemingly on the verge of collapse.
- I loved the design of the camera ring that Caprice wears to document the surgeries. We’re probably only a decade or so off from those being a reality.
- Huge shout out to composer Howard Shore’s creepy and industrial-leaning score. I didn’t realize this, but Shore has composed the music for all but one of Cronenberg’s films.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I attended a press screening for Crimes of the Future. There were a dozen or so of us in attendance. It was deathly quiet as everyone filed out.