Review: Crimes of the Future (2022)
After eight years, David Cronenberg returns with Crimes of the Future, an entertaining, haunting, deeply-weird picture that casts an entrancing spell with its provocative ideas and imagery. It proves a synthesis of sorts for Cronenberg, blending the body horror of his early pictures with the self-reflexivity of A Dangerous Method. It’s an arch film, with stylized performances, a vague, hollowed out setting, and Cronenberg’s famously clinical approach, which keeps us at arm’s length from the proceedings, even as the camera burrows into the very organs of its characters. It’s a film that plays like catnip to Cronenberg’s admirers (myself very much included), but is likely to alienate a substantial portion of the people who watch it. In this way, it isn’t dissimilar from the majority of his works over his 50-plus year career.
Incorporating many of Cronenberg’s popular themes, including alienation, evolution, and the transformation of the body, and even sharing a title with his experimental 1970 feature, Crimes of the Future is Cronenberg’s first true body horror picture since 1999’s eXistenZ. In a sense, it could be seen as a kind of “Greatest Hits” for the director, with the spartan formal approach, arch performances from its big-name stars, including Viggo Mortensen (who is working with Cronenberg for the fourth time), and the thematic blend of alienating eroticism, esoteric philosophizing, and gruesome on-screen imagery that makes him so distinct and troubling, especially in our sanitized contemporary cinematic landscape.
But it’d be wrong to label Crimes of the Future as a film that only looks to the past and remixes familiar elements from Cronenberg’s other films. Certainly, it bears resemblance to his earlier works. The props and artifacts of this desiccated future world are of a piece with the objects of his body horror canon, and once again designed by frequent collaborator Carol Spier. For instance, the surgery pod, which Mortensen’s artist Saul Tenser uses to undergo performance art surgery to remove his vestigial, toxic organs, recalls the bioports of eXistenZ, while the controls, which Léa Seydoux’s Caprice uses to operate the pod, are akin to the bug typewriter of Naked Lunch, linked by their fleshiness and tactile genital nature.
Cronenberg originally wrote the earliest drafts of Crimes of the Future over 20 years ago, so you can see how the seeds of the idea act as a natural follow up to eXistenZ. But the conditions of the past 20 years, filled with war and recession and climate breakdown and pandemic, have changed the parameters of the world Cronenberg is speaking to.
So he has adjusted accordingly, and shaped the film to our moment. It speaks to the contemporary mind, one crippled by anxiety over health, climate, body, and the emotional disintegration of our communal bonds. Many of us agonize over a hypothetical oncoming catastrophe, which dissolves society as we know it and permanently remakes the concept of the human. In Crimes of the Future, this catastrophe has already occurred, and seems ancient history, not even worthy of comment. It could’ve happened 10 years or 100 years ago—it doesn’t matter to the characters, as humans are now different, and the promise of returning to the “before times” is not an option. So they chart an uncertain way forward, reacting to their circumstances, paralyzed by fear, uneasy with their surroundings, and turning to art and self-expression as means of staving off the darkness. Sound familiar?
In the world of the film, humans have mutated past pain. An unspoken climate catastrophe lurks over the entire picture. The setting of the film, in a graffitied, decaying Athens, makes it seem as if the characters are living in the ruins of the modern world. It’s the future, but it’s also the past, and this uneasy temporal situation adds to the film’s discombobulating effect. You cannot situate this place, this time, these sorts of people. But like with even his most defamiliarizing work, Crime of the Future points back to deeply familiar territory: our bodies, our minds, our consumption, of both food and art.
The narrative follows two paths of progression. One delves into the artistic life of Mortensen’s Saul Tenser, who transforms the degradation and evolution of his body into art. Seemingly spurred by the toxic environmental conditions, Saul grows new organs, and with the help of Seydoux’s Caprice, puts on elaborate performances, where the novel, tattooed organs are removed and displayed for an adoring audience. Saul is a famous artist, using his bodily pain to create art; he sublimates his bodily agony into artistic ecstasy.
Cronenberg uses Saul to speak to the challenges of producing art, the risk, the reward, the relationship to the “body of work” and the audience. Cronenberg, trusting Mortensen more than any collaborator over the past 20 years, allows the actor to speak to his own artistic anxieties and frustrations. Saul’s thoughts are not Cronenberg’s, but Cronenberg shows more of himself through Saul than is typical in his films; he aligns himself with Saul much as he did with the Mad Scientists of his early films, making Saul something of the Mad Artist. The conversations about art in the film recall the self-reflexive psychoanalysis of A Dangerous Method, where Mortensen similarly speaks for Cronenberg, in that case as Sigmund Freud.
There’s also Saul’s shadow life, where he acts as a contact for Welket Bungué’s Detective Cope, who investigates mutations for the New Vice Unit, a part of a shadowy governmental organization. Welket has Saul collaborate with the National Organ Registry, which is run by Don McKellar’s Wippet and Kristen Stewart’s Timlin. The registry documents all novel organs, but also has connections to an underworld, where artists and others seek to advance an evolutionary understanding of humanity and bodily mutation. The authorities use Saul’s artistic profile to allow access to these underground societies, focusing on one involving Scott Speedman’s Lang Dotrice, who has a mysterious affinity for synthetics.
These two narrative avenues are not distinct. They overlap, and Saul’s feelings of guilt and manipulation in the latter avenue feed his dissatisfaction and artistic approach in the former. They also dovetail with Seydoux’s Caprice, who is something of the magician’s assistant to Mortensen’s Saul, but who aspires to be an artist in her own right. Her burgeoning artistic ambition fuels her, as she aspires to transform herself. She believes in the transcendent power of art. Saul…not so much anymore.
All of these characters are seeking answers. They are drawn to new ways of living, new ways of seeing. They live in an atomized world where genuine emotional feeling is in short supply and where almost no one is interested in “the old sex.” In Crash, Cronenberg shows a similar progression from the old sex to a new one. Sex is not a rush for the characters in Crash, so they have to amplify their experiences and blend their sexuality with the violence of automobile accidents.
In Crimes of the Future, the transformation is similar, but these people use art and surgery and invasive technology as the replacement for sexual connection. After Saul’s first performance in the film, Kristen Stewart’s Timlin approaches him and whispers praise in his ear, while Caprice watches and listens nearby. She licks and bites her lips in the sensual way that Stewart has mastered and states, “Surgery is the new sex.” She then leans closer, and whispers, as if admitting her dirtiest secret, that when Caprice was cutting into Saul, she wished Saul was cutting into her.
“Surgery is the new sex” becomes this film’s answer to “Long live the new flesh” from 1983’s Videodrome. That line became something of a mantra for body horror genre enthusiasts and the wider Cronenberg fandom, but it also spoke to the film’s proclamation that the new flesh had arrived and there was no going back to the old flesh. The phrase is a statement, not a question or a prediction. It speaks to reality as it is, not as it could be.
“Surgery is the new sex” is something similar. It summarizes the film’s preoccupations and may even become a meme after the film’s general release, but it also captures the desperation of this world, these characters, while also acting as a metaphor for the dysfunctions of our real world.
We may not live in a world where people grow new organs and perform surgery without anesthetic as performance art, but we do live in a culture of emotional dislocation and dulled pleasures. Like Saul, we are searching for a way to deal with the pain of being alive. We amplify, we extend, we try to escape our own bodies in an effort to transcend our condition. The film’s title might speak to crimes of the future, but it’s the unescapable agony of the present that haunts this picture, and us.
9 out of 10
Crimes of the Future (2022, Canada/France/UK/Greece)
Written and directed by David Cronenberg; starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Scott Speedman, Don McKellar, Welket Bungué, Lihi Kornowski, Tanaya Beatty, Nadia Litz.